Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture by Carolin Duttlinger (review)
Reviewed by: Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture by Carolin Duttlinger J. J. Long Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture. By Carolin Duttlinger. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2022. 437 + xvii pp. £98. ISBN 978–0-19–285630–2. Carolin Duttlinger's Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture is an extraordinarily rich book. It is also an unclassifiable one, being at once a history of ideas, a work of literary criticism, a cultural history, an exercise in cultural studies, and even, in passing but repeatedly, an account of the formation and differentiation of academic disciplines as the modern university emerged over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is self-confessedly 'provisional and open-ended' (p. vi), but then a taut and hermetically sealed argument would be ill-suited to the subject, forcing closure on an enquiry that extends potentially infinitely into human experience and the manifold ways we seek to make sense of it. Moreover, as the argument progresses, it becomes apparent that any totalizing aims would be hopelessly thwarted by the simple fact that there is no agreement among the writers Duttlinger discusses as to what constitutes attention and distraction in the first place, how these terms relate to each other, and what moral, cultural or political value can or should be ascribed to them. Nor is it possible to posit a developmental historical narrative, given that conceptions of attention and distraction, and the metaphors used to talk about them, emerge, recede and return throughout the period in question. Like many of the writers she discusses (and like a number of commentators before her), Duttlinger notes that the problem of attention, and in particular of distraction and attention deficit, becomes pressing at the point when industrial modernity and urban living begin to place almost insupportable cognitive and sensory demands on the modern subject. In her opening chapter, she traces the emergence of attention and distraction as one of the key preoccupations of modern thought. From Leibniz to Wundt, the chapter examines the ways in which attention was understood between the Enlightenment and the late nineteenth-century, charting also the emergence of psychology as an experimental discipline keen to differentiate itself from philosophy. The chapter [End Page 223] is largely expository, and very deftly done, but it is very much a precursor to the main subject of the book, which is the twentieth century. Long chapters on Kafka, Musil, Benjamin and Adorno alternate with chapters on psychotechnics, self-help literature, portrait photography, and musicology. The chapters on the four main authors are the most impressive, as Duttlinger pursues her discussion of attention and distraction across their entire oeuvres, teasing out the different understandings, inflections, developments and recursions as they each engage repeatedly with the problem throughout their careers. The book closes with short discussions of post-war writers (Celan, Sebald, and Hoppe), which feels a little anticlimactic after the chapter on Adorno. This is a tour de force, and allows Adorno to emerge as a far more flexible and nuanced theorist of attention than his major statements on the subject might lead one to assume. Since her first book, Kafka and Photography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), which itself followed Mark M. Anderson's methodological lead, Duttlinger has pursued a form of criticism that has rehabilitated biography as one part of the critic's interpretative toolkit. She does not do this in a naïve way, according to which this or that text simply reflects this or that documented life experience. Rather, she concentrates on the ineluctable embeddedness of writers within specific historical, cultural and social environments, and shows how these worlds inform—often in mediated but nevertheless traceable ways—the work of the writers themselves. She notes, for example, that German and Austrian Gymnasium curricula of the late nineteenth century included compulsory psychology lessons. In Austria, these were based on Gustav Adolf Lindner's Lehrbuch der empirischen Psychologie, which laid emphasis on the necessity of focused attention as a guarantor of cognitive stability and continuity (pp. 88-89). Both Kafka and Musil went through this system, and Duttlinger tracks the ways in...
Read more
Filter 1
