Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention - Rilegato

Gurton-wachter, Lily

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0804796955 ISBN 13: 9780804796958

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2016

Riassunto

This book revisits British Romanticism as a poetics of heightened attention. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as Britain was on the alert for a possible French invasion, attention became a phenomenon of widespread interest, one that aligned and distinguished an unusual range of fields (including medicine, aesthetics, theology, ethics, pedagogy, and politics). Within this wartime context, the Romantic aesthetic tradition appears as a response to a crisis in attention caused by demands on both soldiers and civilians to keep watch. Close formal readings of the poetry of Blake, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, (Charlotte) Smith, and Wordsworth, in conversation with research into Enlightenment philosophy and political and military discourses, suggest the variety of forces competing for—or commanding—attention in the period. This new framework for interpreting Romanticism and its legacy illuminates what turns out to be an ongoing tradition of war literature that, rather than give testimony to or represent warfare, uses rhythm and verse to experiment with how and what we attend to during times of war.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sugli autori

Lily Gurton-Wachter is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri.

Lily Gurton-Wachter is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri.

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Watchwords

Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention

By Lily Gurton-Wachter

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9695-8

Contents

Figures, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Attention's Disciplines, 
1. Reading, a Double Attention, 
2. The Poetics of Alarm and the Passion of Listening, 
3. Bent Earthwards: Wordsworth's Poetics of the Interval, 
4. "That Something Living Is Abroad": Missing the Point in Beachy Head, 
5. Attention's Aches in Keats's Hyperion Poems, 
Afterword: Just Looking, 
Notes, 
Works Cited, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

READING, A DOUBLE ATTENTION

I've discovered that I'm always attentive to, and always thinking about, two things at the same time. I suppose everyone is a bit like that. Certain impressions are so vague that only later, because we remember them, do we even realize we had them. I believe these impressions form a part — perhaps the internal part — of the dual attention we all possess. In my case the two realities that hold my attention are equally vivid.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

One might think that it would be possible to pay a double attention, at one moment doing full justice to the verbal intricacy of a poem and at the next inquiring into the agendas in whose service that intricacy has been put. But here one must recall the difficulty of serving two masters; each will be jealous of the other and demand fidelity to its imperatives.

— Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness

THE FIRST OF SIX "Puzzles for Volunteers!!" (1803) (Figure 6) breaks down the word attention into its component sounds: the letter a, a drawing of a tent, a drawing of an eye, and then the final letters o and n, or on. Substituting the eye for the letter i, the sounds of the word come apart to regroup into something like the imperative to keep an eye on something. The puzzle's clue, "a necessary preliminary," plays on the nascent militarization of attention at the turn of the century in Britain and on its centrality to the act of reading: attention is a prerequisite for the volunteers' military service and for cracking the puzzle itself. And yet while the puzzle demands the continued attention of all war volunteers, it also reminds us of the inattention built into the experience of reading, highlighting the sounds and letters that readers pass over every time they read a word — the eye lurking inconspicuously behind attention, or the bard of bombardment (as the second puzzle reveals). These are the overlooked sounds and shapes that poetry, I want to suggest, keeps an eye on.

Blake pushes an attention to these "Minute Particulars" to its limit, while insisting on a readerly attention that is emphatically distinct from the paranoid watchfulness of political surveillance. Indeed, the puzzle's use of images both to divide the reader's attention and to point to the inattention built into reading itself echoes Blake's larger poetic project, well known for its juxtaposition of word and image that complicates the work of illustration. Blake's interest in the overlap of political and aesthetic modes of observation might be less familiar. In this chapter, I turn to the physiology of reading, the description of which in the eighteenth century repeatedly guards against attention's division. In contrast to this anxiety, I find in Romanticism a poetic tradition that courts a double attention

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0804796955
• ISBN 13: 9780804796958
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 270
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile