Center Your Attention: Moby-Dick

This course responds to the increasingly unignorable sense that attention is a resource under threat. We’ll be thinking about the historical and cultural reasons we all find it hard to focus and using the classroom as a laboratory for working on our own attention, as we read together a major text of world literature. The course will have three main goals: 1) to familiarize students with some of the historical and theoretical work on attention. 2) To experiment with different forms of focusing our attention, in class and out. 3) To pay deep and sustained attention to a tough book that everyone has heard of but that (we are told) it’s ever harder to find the time to really read with the intensity of focus it requires: Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick. That the novel is itself about the obsessive attention of one man to a famously elusive object will, I hope, make this a rewarding experience in more ways than one. But most of all we’ll be on the hunt for our own lost ability to focus.