Attention Crisis: Stream-of-Consciousness Fiction in the Attention Economy

The past decade has seen an upsurge in stream-of-consciousness (SoC) fiction, which has so far mostly been studied in relation to Modernism. SoC is a descriptor for the account of a character's uninterrupted flow of consciousness, often rendered in idiosyncratic punctuation and syntax, which can be highly demanding of the reader's attention. Despite these demands, recent SoC fiction has enjoyed great critical and commercial success, as exemplified by prize-winning novels like Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport (2019), Anna Burns's Milkman (2018), Mike McCormack's Solar Bones (2016), and Jon Fosse's Septology (2021).

This research aims to study the relationship between the increasing number of critically successful SoC novels and the rise of "a popular discourse which conceives of attention in crisis, with difficulty reading its primary symptom" (Bennett 2018:2). Such crisis has been linked to an information overload caused by the attention economy (AE), here understood as "an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity" (Davenport, Beck 2001:20).

This project posits that, in form and content, these novels examine and reflect the cultural construction of time under the AE, while signalling potential alternatives to it.

Following the premise that there is "a financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of distraction" (Odell 2019:12), my project will ask whether, by fostering a different kind of attention (called "deep attention"), SoC fiction possesses a radical potential that drives readers to disengage from the AE. The potential of deep attention has been explored by Julia Bell and Jenny Odell among others, with the latter claiming that, by refusing the AE's frame of reference, one can "make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system." (2019: XVII).

I will expand on Odell's claim to examine how contemporary SoC fiction elicits deep attention and opposes the AE's preference for hyper-attention - a cognitive mode where "multiple foci compete for attention." (Hayles 2007:188) To do so, I will explore how my chosen texts are informed by the AE and determine the specific qualities that denote acts of

resistance to it. Relevance

The re-emergence of SoC fiction is an important trend in contemporary literature, as evidenced by Fosse and Ellmann being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize and the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize, respectively. This project will be the first to explore this re-emergence and its increased commercial and critical valuation. It will fill a research gap within literary studies and contribute to our understanding of the AE and modes of resistance to it.

Additionally, this project will make a valuable contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of attention studies - meaning that researchers in other subjects will also benefit from it.