Recent advances in neuroscience, cognitive studies, disability studies, new materialism, genetic criticism and the digital humanities have transformed our understanding of mind, attention and the human; such a shift finds its metonymical expression in the evolution of our methods of reading and evaluating literature. 

The workshop proposes to rethink the way in which modernist poetics herald and/or resist these changes by utilizing attention and its various metonymies as an anchor and a prompt for the discussion. The significance and originality of the workshop is in pooling our respective resources towards achieving a more comprehensive view of questions that we often treat in isolation –materialist, philosophical and scientific discourses are often seen as competing or in some way incommensurate with one another, even within the field of literary scholarship.

The main critical paradigms included will be:

1) Attention through the Prism of New Conceptualizations of the Human.

Disability studies, animal studies and posthuman theory will inform a consideration of the the transition from a hermeneutics based on conceptual logic to the shifting potentialities of becoming. The first is lodged in the paradigm of the Cartesian cogito and its investment in reason, coherence, control, identification and analogy. The second follows the mutative and unpredictable movements of affect, sensory experience and passive synthesis. The dismodernist or posthuman subject is conceived of as interdependent, shifting, passive. Literature anticipates this change by undermining rigid plot structures and causality in the stringing together of events, by showing characters to be interdependent rather than coherent and separate and by playing with language and form in ways that upset and often frustrate readers’ expectations.

2) Attention through the Prism of Neuroscience

Exponents of new cognitive and neuroscientific studies will represent the psychological and biological paradigms that allow for an empirical mapping of reading processes. The assumption underlying this critical turn is that humanist disciplines can be productively supplemented by an understanding of how the brain functions when we read, judge or interpret literature. This is particularly significant in light of recent discoveries pertaining to the plasticity of the brain and the processes of neuronal recycling. The current scientific turn in literary studies is often promoted as an antidote to the slippages of poststructuralist thinking. One of the objects of this rubric will be to consider how positivistic empirical approaches and biological study might complement rather than undermine philosophical and poststructuralist approaches. 

3) Attention through the Prism of New Materialism, Genetic Criticism and the Digital Humanities

This group of presentations will be devoted to studying historical and cultural factors that in some way shape the work. We will start by looking at the process of composition. Manuscripts, marginalia, edited versions, corrections, translations and other documents generated in the process of composition reveal the often collaborative nature of writing. It is not only the author but publishers, radio programmers, censors, journalists and lawmakers who contribute to the end-product. The technology and methodology of writing, the historical and cultural context in which the works are conceived and their various source materials all combine to reflect a picture of composition that upsets our image of the writer in isolation. The digital humanities offers statistic-based models of reading that allow us to think of new ways of engaging with and interpreting texts. This day will be devoted to testing how the above paradigms may be fruitfully brought together to create new hybrid models of textual analysis and how we might address the validity and significance of their results.

The workshop’s underlying goal will be to return to the canonical works of modernism with a renewed focus on the articulations and significances of attention. Each of the participants will introduce his or her critical approach and then go on to illustrate its application to an interpretation of modernist writing. 

The purpose in attending to these multiple questions is to think how we might continue to work to preserve the legacy of the authors that we champion and how their works of fiction, in turn, may promote or even challenge new paradigms of thought.