Phenomenology of Attention

Quite an enjoyable lecture on attention, I will listen to it again, attentively. I am interested in the kind of attention paid by significant criticism to unexpected aspects of the texts under scrutiny. Good criticism is quite often "savage" in the way the lecturer says at the end. And it tries to see what nobody else has seen before, in the text, although in theory it was there for anyone to see. (And it is there now, at any rate). For instance, on the Auden-Brueghel-Icarus example—there seems to be some element of homosexual eroticism in Auden's gaze on the boy's "white legs", and thence we may extract a homoerotic significance in Icarus, not shared or perceived by ordinary seamen or the "ordinary viewers" of the picture, but discovered by Auden, a secret spectator, one in the know, savagely attentive, or rather using or recycling a structural position prepared by him by Brueghel's picture for quite different reasons (ordinary life vs. mythology, etc.).

It seems to me there's a paper in the offing here, relating a number of topics: "Topsight, Hindsight, and Critical Attention." In a way it's already written, here, but who knows, I may try to rewrite it and something may catch my attention along the way.

Atención a la atención

—oOo—