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Are we paying enough attention? At least since the nineteenth
century, critics have alleged a widespread and profound failure of
attentiveness—to others, to ourselves, to the world around us, to
what is truly worthy of focus. Why is there such great anxiety over
attention? What is at stake in understanding attention and the
challenges it faces? This book investigates attention from a range
of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history,
anthropology, art history, and comparative literature. Each chapter
begins with a concrete scene whose protagonists are trying—and
often failing—to attend. Authors examine key moments in the
history of the study of attention; pose attention as a
philosophical problem; explore the links between attention,
culture, and technology; and consider the significance of attention
for conceptualizations of human subjectivity. Readers encounter
nineteenth-century experiments in boredom, ornithologists conveying
sound through field notations, wearable attention-enhancing
prosthetics, students using online learning platforms, and
inquiries into attention as a cognitive state and moral virtue.
Amid mounting concern about digital mediation of experience, the
rise of “surveillance capitalism,” and the commodification of
attention, Scenes of Attention deepens the thinking that is needed
to protect the freedom of attention and the forms of life that make
it possible.
Are we paying enough attention? At least since the nineteenth
century, critics have alleged a widespread and profound failure of
attentiveness—to others, to ourselves, to the world around us, to
what is truly worthy of focus. Why is there such great anxiety over
attention? What is at stake in understanding attention and the
challenges it faces? This book investigates attention from a range
of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history,
anthropology, art history, and comparative literature. Each chapter
begins with a concrete scene whose protagonists are trying—and
often failing—to attend. Authors examine key moments in the
history of the study of attention; pose attention as a
philosophical problem; explore the links between attention,
culture, and technology; and consider the significance of attention
for conceptualizations of human subjectivity. Readers encounter
nineteenth-century experiments in boredom, ornithologists conveying
sound through field notations, wearable attention-enhancing
prosthetics, students using online learning platforms, and
inquiries into attention as a cognitive state and moral virtue.
Amid mounting concern about digital mediation of experience, the
rise of “surveillance capitalism,” and the commodification of
attention, Scenes of Attention deepens the thinking that is needed
to protect the freedom of attention and the forms of life that make
it possible.
An irreverent critical lexicon of academic life and culture The
university: The very name evokes knowledge, culture, and the
magnificently universal ambition at the heart of this essential
institution. Bastions of free inquiry and a free society, engines
of social transformation and economic progress, enclosed gardens of
ennobling reflection and creation, universities encompass the
wisdom of the past and the hope of the future. Or do they? This
critical glossary-written by a group of Princeton graduate students
and faculty-defines fifty-eight terms common to academic life in a
style that will prick both egos and consciences. From "academia" to
"vocation," "canon" to "peer review," "discipline" to
"methodology," the book scrutinizes the often stultifying
structures of modern disciplinary life, calls out a slavish
devotion to "knowledge production" as the enemy of thought, and
even dissects the notion of "academic excellence." Feisty and
darkly funny, passionate and deeply insightful, this book raises
hard questions about teaching, research, theory, practice, and
academic labor. The result is a must-read dispatch from today's
academic trenches-one that is sure to provoke discussion and
debate.
When Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett answered his jury duty summons, he expected to spend a few days catching up on his reading in the court waiting room. Instead, he finds himself thrust into a high-pressure role as the jury foreman in a Manhattan trial. There he comes face to face with a stunning act of violence, a maze of conflicting evidence, and a parade of bizarre witnesses. But it is later, behind the closed door of the jury room, that he encounters the essence of the jury experience — he and eleven citizens from radically different backgrounds must hammer consensus out of confusion and strong disagreement. By the time he hands over the jury’s verdict, Burnett has undergone real transformation, not just in his attitude toward the legal system, but in his understanding of himself and his peers.
Offering a compelling courtroom drama and an intimate and sometimes humorous portrait of a fractious jury, A Trial by Jury is also a finely nuanced examination of law and justice, personal responsibility and civic duty, and the dynamics of power and authority between twelve equal people.
In "Moby-Dick," Ishmael declares, "Be it known that, waiving all
argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a
fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." Few readers today know
just how much argument Ishmael is waiving aside. In fact,
Melville's antihero here takes sides in one of the great
controversies of the early nineteenth century--one that ultimately
had to be resolved in the courts of New York City. In "Trying
Leviathan," D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice
v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy
against the then-popular--and biblically sanctioned--view that the
whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was mundane: whether whale
oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state inspection. But the
trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than
the order of nature--and how we know it--was at stake. Burnett
vividly recreates the trial, during which a parade of
experts--pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin
lawyers--took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and
anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages.
Falling in the middle of the century between Linnaeus and Darwin,
the trial dramatized a revolutionary period that saw radical
transformations in the understanding of the natural world. Out went
comfortable biblical categories, and in came new sorting methods
based on the minutiae of interior anatomy--and louche details about
the sexual behaviors of God's creatures.
When leviathan breached in New York in 1818, this strange beast
churned both the natural and social orders--and not everyone would
survive.
Over the course of the twentieth century, our understanding of and
relationship to whales underwent astonishing changes. With The
Sounding of the Whale, D. Graham Burnett tells the fascinating
story of the transformation of cetaceans from grotesque monsters,
useful only as wallowing kegs of fat and fertilizer, to playful
friends of humanity, bellwethers of environmental devastation, and,
finally, totems of the counterculture in the Age of Aquarius. A
sweeping history, grounded in nearly a decade of research, The
Sounding of the Whale tells a remarkable tale of how science,
politics, and simple human wonder interwined to transform the way
we see these behemoths from below.
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