ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how the focus on attention grasps the experiential dimension of literarity with greater lucidity than formalist or thematic schema for reading literature. The emphasis falls on how one is called to attention by a work of art and how the notion of “affordancy,” a term from design theory, proffers a secure purchase on literarity as a threshold of experience per se. The reader is oriented to the significance of attention with regard to how one finds a place in the world of one's perceptions. The phenomenological and cognitive stakes of the argument are initially brought out by a reading of visual art: Caravaggio's The Calling of St. Matthew. Subsequently, a reading of the conspicuous syntactical effects generated in Henry Green's novel Caught and a correlative sampling of sentences by Proust undergird the assertion that within the realm of the literary syntax shapes attention.
