Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature by Natalie M. Phillips (review)

Everyone and everything, it seems, is out to distract us. Inflammatory tweets draw attention away from failed legislation and damning allegations. Sesquicentennial celebrations distract a nation from colonial violence both past and ongoing. Our own smartphones pester us inces santly during labours of scholarship that demand sustained attention: reading complex works, crafting sentences, thinking through arguments. But what if the problem is not distraction at all, but rather that our view of what counts as "paying attention" is too narrow? One of the central arguments of Natalie M. Phillips's Distraction is that the long eighteenth century reimagined the unfocused mind "as a generative force," and, as a result, writers "increasingly sought to forge literary structures meant to work with, rather than reform, distracted readers" (3). Phillips establishes from the outset that a literary history of distraction must also be a history of categorization: more specifically, an account of how readers and writers understood the ways in which various kinds of distracted cognitive states hung together, and how these groupings shifted or splintered.

The structure of Phillips's book is itself a breathtaking feat of organization. Each chapter links a unique category of distraction to three elements: an eighteenth-century work of literature, a narrative or formal feature, and a facet of twenty-first-century neuroscientific study. Chapter 1 traces a history of "attention span" up to modern neural rubrics of "sustained attention" and "cognitive control" (59). Phillips reads the wandering minds of Samuel Johnson's Rambler and Idler not as merely thematic, but as a crucial part of narrative struc tures of repetition and dramatic irony that aimed to teach readers the "metaskill of focusing on focus" (45). Chapter 2 examines how the "obliviousness to sexual danger" experienced by Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless, William Hogarth's Harlot, and John Cleland's Fanny Hill maps onto modern cog ni tive theories about "situational aware ness" and "cognitive overload" (27). Female characters like Betsy are, Phillips argues, not "thoughtless" at all, but actually have too much to think about. Chapter 3 takes on two bodies of cognitive research on scattered attention: first, working memory capacity, and second, "how rhythms in our environment affect our ability to 'chunk' information" (99). Phillips addresses precedents to these concepts in David Harley's vibrating brains, David Hume's differ ently paced emotions, and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, which creates "prose rhythms to match the complex cognitive rhythms of each character's focus" (101). Fixated attention is the single-minded focus of chapter 4, which examines gothic compulsion in William Godwin's Caleb Williams and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly: Or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. Phillips argues that these texts exemplify a "paradox of selective attention" in "moments when intense focus double as attention blindness" (135). Chapter 5 focuses on Pride and Prejudice and argues that Austen's narrative system allocates "narrative space to figures according to the relative sophistication of their concentration" (175). Hence, characters such as Elizabeth Bennet and Sense and Sensibility's Elinor Dashwood, who can multi-focus and multitask even while "diverted," are granted more mental substance than characters who are less cognitively mobile.

Distraction's various analyses of individual periodicals, novels, and poems will be of particular interest to eighteenth-century scholars work ing on the interconnected themes of attention deficits, attention surfeits, and various speeds and cadences of thought and feeling. Chapters 1 through 5 move nimbly between close readings of specific literary texts and broader histories of the mind/soul and of emotion. There is, perhaps, a missed opportunity to flesh out more fully connections between affect and genre in the chapter 1 discussion of Johnson's Idler's "appeal[s] to pathos" (40). How, for example, does this appeal square with Adam Smith's claim that "a piece [of writing] of a small length" (for example, a periodical essay) is unlikely to raise passions, much less...