ABSTRACT
This final chapter extends the understanding of attention as a feature of imaginative activity in general. Contemporary philosophical theories of rational imagination are adduced to reinforce the claim that attention is inextricable from the burdens of reason-giving. Nabokov's Lolita and William Carlos Williams's “The Red Wheelbarrow” foster opportunities to see how literarity expands the range of attention and how such expansion cultivates capacities for furthering human experience. The chapter concludes by glossing some ways in which contemporary literary critical thought about reading and understanding literature dovetails with and is distinguished from the argument undertaken in this book. Ultimately, attention is deemed to be the prerequisite of thinking literature and, more importantly, of thinking of literature as a model for engaging the realm of practical activity.
