“Reading: Forms of Attention and Distraction”
LMU-Princeton Summer Seminar
Munich, June 16–18, 2025
Organized by Joel Lande, Susanne Reichlin, and Carlos Spoerhase
In collaboration with Bailey E. Sincox, Johannes Wankhammer (Princeton), and the CRC “Cultures of Vigilance” (Munich)
Our contemporary moment is often diagnosed as one of attention deficit, with digital distractions constantly threatening our economic and intellectual productivity. However, this concern is far from new. As early as 1900, critics lamented the distractions of the cinema and flashing billboards. Even this historical perspective proves too limited once one considers the long pre-modern tradition of warnings against distracting stimuli in religious practices (Desert Fathers, monks), schools, scholarly contexts, and even military defense.
The 2025 LMU-Princeton Summer Seminar explores the cultural history of attention and distraction, seeking to better understand historical continuities and discontinuities: What idealizations and vilifications of attention and distraction do we encounter in different eras? How has the fallibility of human concentration been historically understood? How is attention cultivated and habituated, and what bodily practices (sitting, kneeling, walking) and media (devotional images, recitation, bells) shape it? What historical distinctions – for example, between voluntary and involuntary attention – can be observed? Must attention always be directed transitively toward an object? What intransitive varieties of attention, often described as mere openness and objectless anticipation, do we find in mystical and other epistemic contexts?
Long before modernity, reading, as a paradigmatic attention-absorbing technique, played a special role in reflections on attention and distraction. Our seminar therefore explores reading as a “model case” for interdisciplinary debates about attention. From a cultural-historical perspective, we will inquire into when forms of distracted reading or self-forgetful reading become thematic; how texts’ ability to orient and manipulate our attention can be addressed; and how literary practices (philological criticism, close reading) can be situated in more encompassing historical frameworks of attention. Our goal is to investigate distraction and attention less as an opposition than as mutually conditioning poles, constantly redefining focal point and horizon. By examining the long history of practices and discourses that shape this relationship, we hope to rethink our own reading practices and to reassess contemporary discourses on the dangers of distraction.
Room and board will be provided for the duration of the seminar; participants are responsible for the cost of travel to Munich, Germany. Discussions will take place in English and German.
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To apply for the Summer Seminar, please send a short CV along with an abstract of max. 400-words outlining a brief presentation on the seminar topic by January 24, 2025 to lmu_pu@princeton.edu.