In 2023 The New Yorker published the viral article ‘The End of the English Major’ which documented the drop in enrolments in the humanities across the U.S. What stood out most for Professor Ronan McDonald (University of Melbourne) was the assertion by one featured university professor that the answer could be in our phone devices; that people are reading fewer books—and therefore failing to undertake the level of reading required for a thriving English department.
His fellowship project at the Trinity Long Room Hub ‘Critical Attention: Neurohumanities, Close-Reading and the Distraction Economy’, seeks to explore just this, how ‘close-reading’ as a central skill of English literature studies can help us understand attention and distraction, and understand what the reading brain is doing.
Shane O'Mara, Christopher Morash and Ronan McDonald
As part of his fellowship, Professor McDonald is working with Professor Shane O’Mara (Neuroscience, TCD) and Professor Christopher Morash (English, TCD), who chaired the recent ‘Fellow in Focus’ discussion at the Trinity Long Room Hub. In the move from print to screen, or book to phone, Professor Morash asked his colleagues, “is our attention dying?”
While Professor McDonald admitted a certain “techno pessimism” in the humanities disciplines, he said “reading itself was part of this history of cultural scares.” Novel-reading was seen as something which could distract the worker, and women in particular were “seen as susceptible to the dangers of romance” in the novel. However, he added, more recently “we’re talking about attention in terms of commodity”.
On the question of whether our brains are in fact being “rewired”, Professor O’Mara argued that “everything rewires your brain”, and “drifting off” is just a “design feature” of our brain.
Professor McDonald suggested that “we read with a combination of attention and distraction”, with the latter allowing us to connect our own experiences to the text. The achievement of a “flow-state” through certain creative or physical endeavours was also under discussion, with Professor McDonald differentiating this more “passive” state from what he described as an “active sort of reading”. He proposed that ‘close-reading’ as a central skill of English literature studies could be an opportunity to demonstrate the “social good” of English in this distraction economy.
Professor O’Mara said he believed there was a lot of “substitution going on” where people were reading on screens instead of print, or listening in audio format instead of reading books, and where new genres are becoming popular.
Despite “actors motivated by commodifying one’s attention”, Professor McDonald said that his worry was not about the future of literature but about “the future of literature studies.”