ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at various ways that slow looking and description are connected. The scholar Werner Wolf talks about description as a "cognitive frame". By this he means that when we engage in the act of description-and also when we read, hear, or otherwise receive descriptions composed by others-we are mentally attuned to certain kinds of knowable features. Another way to put this is that description is topographical; it describes perceptible features. First, we understand description as a cognitive frame that orients our attention to the surface features of things. The idea that description encourages close looking is familiar to anyone who teaches writing: set students the task of writing a detailed description of an object or scene, and in the process they will record many more aspects of it than they saw at first glance. Physical vantage point has to do with altering one's physical perspective in order to see and describe things from a different angle.
