The economy of attention and the novel

Abstract

Many twenty-first-century novels have reacted to the changing economies of attention as well as to increasing anxieties about inattention and attention deficits. These ‘attention novels’ do not only include multiple shifts in narrative perspective, fragmented styles, and an aggregation of high-impact stimuli to bind readers’ attentional capacities: They also develop a multi-layered poetics of attention, which resonates with the politics of attention conducted by, for instance, the literary prize economy, and the increasing desire for fascination in a media-saturated age. Focussing on Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), this chapter explores the ways in which twenty-first-century novels relate to discourses on attention and attention deficits and introduces new approaches for analysing ‘attention narratives.’