“my thoughts are elsewhere” Reading (In) Attention in Beckett’s The Unnamable
This essay examines Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable from the perspective of what N. Katherine Hayles calls “deep attention” and “hyper attention,” by which she respectively refers to the ability of human attention to focus on a single object for a certain amount of time and to shift rapidly bet...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Polish Association for the Study of English
2018-12-01
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| Series: | Polish Journal of English Studies |
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| Online Access: | http://pjes.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/PJES_4-2_3_Thomas-Thoelen.pdf |
| Summary: | This essay examines Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable from the perspective of what N. Katherine Hayles calls “deep attention” and “hyper attention,” by which she respectively refers to the ability of human attention to focus on a single object for a certain amount of time and to shift rapidly between multiple objects. Hayles furthermore associates “deep attention” with the practice of (close) reading a printed text and “hyper attention” with digital (screen) reading, moving from one browser tab or hyperlink to the next. In today’s highly mediatized society, needless to say, digital reading is becoming increasingly common (if not the norm altogether). According to Hayes, the result is that “hyper attention” is being privileged at the expense of “deep attention.” While Beckett’s The Unnamable predates the practice of digital reading by some time, it is the contention here that the novel is nevertheless extremely pertinent in this context because of how it suggests inattention to be the necessary condition for the possibility of attention, both in its deep and hyper varieties. |
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| ISSN: | 2545-0131 2543-5981 |