ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the distractions of the digital age have become the spur for new writing that is freshly alert to attention’s vagaries and fragilities. The novels and memoirs analysed above do take into account “attention’s vagaries and fragilities,” as is obviously the case with the texts concerned with cognitive disability. Salient aspect of the poetics of attention resides in a specific treatment of time. Narrative is particularly well endowed in terms of rhythmic patterning, all the more so when its poetic pole is activated by importing the figural and phonic recurrences of refrains and other burdens. Attention enhances perception and makes for a more vivid experience of the moment and of the object of consideration, which implies a process of intensification. Contiguity, proximity, immediacy and “presential enthralment,” all such items point at a situatedness in relation to the object and other subjects of attention that inheres in reader’s own embodiment and thereby resonates in temporal and spatial terms.
