'The dangerous division of men's minds': Attention and distraction in late-Elizabethan romances and their readers

“男人思想的危险分裂”：伊丽莎白晚期浪漫小说及其读者的注意力和分心

• 批准号: 2244634
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2019 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2244634
• 关键词: dangerous; division; men; minds; Attention

Anxieties about mind-wandering and attention failure were pervasive in early modern Europe. Humanist pedagogues fretted over scatter- brained students, and religious thinkers obsessed over the elimination of disturbances from their devotional regimens. In late Elizabethan England, popular romance narratives became the target of particular concern about distraction. Tiffany Werth has shown how the pedagogical and clerical establishments associated the romance genre with Catholicity, dissipation, and seductive femininity. However, there has been little discussion of the phobia of distraction which characterised anti-romance discourse. Romance reading was accused of inducing devious mental straying, absorbed reverie, and lax attention to worthier materials. Conversely, as Grafton and Jardine note, serious humanist reading required "strenuous attentiveness." Romances were also maligned for being intrinsically distracted, with their absent-minded protagonists and digressive narrative strands. My research investigates how anti-romance discourse was bound up with early modern ideas about the psychosomatic nature and ethical valences of attentive and distracted states of mind, and how romances playfully engaged those ideas. I suggest that romances by Spenser, Sidney, Wroth, and Ariosto (via Harington) find a ludic, subversive potential in failures of attention. The later, 18th-century history of distraction has been investigated by Natalie Phillips (Distraction, 2016) and Patricia Spacks (Boredom, 1995). However, excepting the work of Gary Kuchar on Herbert and Raphael Lyne on Shakespeare, 16th- century distraction remains unexplored. Situating early modern distraction within a nexus of pedagogical, religious, political, and even medical contexts, I aim to bring the history of reading-and romance's position therein-into mutually illuminative dialogue with the history of mind.

在近代早期的欧洲，关于走神和注意力不集中的说法很普遍。人文主义的教育家们为头脑混乱的学生们感到烦恼，而宗教思想家们则痴迷于消除他们虔诚生活中的干扰。在中世纪晚期的英格兰，流行的浪漫故事成为人们特别关注的目标。蒂芙尼·沃思（Tiffany Werth）展示了教育和神职机构如何将浪漫类型与天主教、放荡和诱人的女性气质联系起来。然而，很少有讨论的恐惧症分心的特点，反浪漫的话语。浪漫阅读被指责为诱导迂回的精神流浪，吸收幻想，并松懈注意到更有价值的材料。相反，正如格拉夫顿和贾丁所指出的，严肃的人文主义阅读需要“全神贯注”。浪漫小说也因其本质上的分心而受到诽谤，其心不在焉的主角和离题的叙事线索。我的研究调查了反浪漫的话语是如何与早期现代思想联系在一起的，这些思想是关于注意力集中和分心状态的心身性质和道德价值的，以及浪漫是如何与这些思想嬉戏的。我认为斯宾塞、西德尼、沃思和阿里奥斯托（通过哈林顿）的浪漫小说在注意力的缺失中找到了一种滑稽的、颠覆性的潜力。Natalie菲利普斯（Distraction，2016）和Patricia Spacks（Boredom，1995）研究了18世纪后期分心的历史。然而，除了加里库查尔对赫伯特和拉斐尔莱恩对莎士比亚的工作，16-世纪的分心仍然没有探索。将早期现代的分心置于教学、宗教、政治甚至医学背景的联系中，我的目标是将阅读的历史和浪漫在其中的地位与心灵的历史进行相互启发的对话。