Course #: 01:090:295:H1
Index: 10586
Tuesday, 12:10 PM - 3:10 PM
College Avenue
BRT-155
David Kurnick
This course responds to the increasingly unignorable sense that attention is a resource under threat. We’ll be thinking about the historical and cultural reasons we all find it hard to focus and using the classroom as a laboratory for working on our own attention, as we read together a major text of world literature.
The course will have three main goals: 1) to familiarize students with some of the historical and theoretical work on attention. 2) To experiment with different forms of focusing our attention, in class and out. 3) To pay deep and sustained attention to a tough book that everyone has heard of but that (we are told) it’s ever harder to find the time to really read with the intensity of focus it requires: Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick. That the novel is itself about the obsessive attention of one man to a famously elusive object will, I hope, make this a rewarding experience in more ways than one. In Melville’s book, Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of Moby-Dick famously becomes a metaphor for both cosmic and historically specific questions: from the Romantic exaltation of human creativity to the enlightenment fantasy of dominating nature, from the capitalist and imperialist hunger for territorial and market expansion to the imposition of political tyranny. Over the semester we’ll learn about all of these. But most of all we’ll be on the hunt for our own lost ability to focus.
Moby-Dick is a long book—about 600 pages in the current Penguin edition—but not too long to read at a leisurely pace over the course of a term. Covering 50-75 pages per week will allow us time and mental space to aerate our reading schedule with other activities. I’m planning on one brief supplemental reading every week or so; these short excerpts will be drawn from work in a variety of disciplines on the crisis of attention, including philosophy, cognitive science, media studies, art history, and religious studies. The idea is to provide students with a historical and philosophical sense of what attention is, when and how it’s been understood, and how and why it’s been thought of as changing.
A major aspect of the course will be conducting directed experiments with our own focus, with the assistance of colleagues and visitors who are specialists in some form of attention. I’d like to invite someone to train us in techniques of meditation and nature observation; an English professor friend from CUNY who teaches public speaking is ready to train us in recitation and oratory (crucial to Melville’s own cultural moment, and to his novel’s own style) as a way of focusing on language’s texture; at least one of my English department colleagues with expertise in book history will be invited to help us think about now format affects attention, looking with us at different book, periodical, and screen versions of Melville’s text; I hope to lure as well at least one of the Princeton professors associated with The Order of the Third Bird, a loose and secretive group that organizes site-specific collective acts of attention-paying to random pieces of the world—an abandoned lot, a piece of public art, a strip of seashore (I learned about them in a New Yorker piece by Nathan Heller called “The Battle for Attention”). Alongside these visits, we’ll be trying out experiments in focusing on our reading: for at least one session we will bring in all of our devices, and find out how Melville’s text fares in an environment where it competes with our texting, social media updates, and internet connections; in some sessions we’ll read aloud from the text, experiencing the novel as many of Melville’s contemporaries would have; in others we’ll disperse ourselves in the student center, trying to read in public; in some, we’ll go bookless, trying to hold in mind what we’ve read independently and discuss it without having a text to hand; in some, we’ll try background music; in some we’ll listen to the various audiobook recordings of the text; in some we’ll read silently but in company.
