Grounded in a thorough understanding of differing modes of attention in the period and drawing inspiration from Simone Weil in particular, Watchwords is a book worth attending to.
Jeffrey N. Cox
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900_______________________________________________________________________
In her excellent book Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention, Lily Gurton-Wachter examines the varied conditions of ... Read moreattentiveness that occur in times of war. Gurton-Wachter's study is widely interdisciplinary, drawing on an impressive range of writing in aesthetics, moral philosophy, politics, and the science of mind.
Noel Jackson
Review of English Studies
For Foucault, the panopticon modeled instead 'a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men.' Not just a chilling architectural marvel, it was also a 'figure of political technology' that turned perceived surveillance and the threat of punishment toward the self-regulation of a citizenry just as effectively as it did that of prisoners. Such an atmosphere of disciplinary watchfulness Lily Gurton-Wachter finds both called for and resisted in her excellent first book, Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention. For late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britons, Gurton-Wachter demonstrates how war abroad and the risk of war at home led to an atmosphere of heightened, militarized attention that demanded vigilance from soldier and citizen alike.
Carmen Faye Mathes
Modern Philology
Smart, well-researched, and provocatively argued, this book powerfully demonstrates how the seemingly least political demands of poets (to pay attention) turn out to be deeply enmeshed in political discourse of the time.
Brian McGrath
Clemson University
A compelling exploration of the interplay between a poetics of heightened attention and the political debates and technological innovations associated with vigilance and alarm, this book will be important to all Romanticists interested in the dynamic relationship between aesthetic form, affect, and cultural milieu.
Nancy Yousef
City University of New York
As Gurton-Wachter explains in her astonishing first book, while we may be accustomed to isolating the pains of hypervigilance from the pleasures of aesthetic experience, Romantic poetics are forged in proximity to wartime habits of instrumentalized attention...Watchwords makes the original, devastating claim that to write and read poetry is not to resist the militarization of everyday life, but to train oneself to sustain it.
Anahid Nersessian
Literature Compass
Gurton-Wachter's study is primarily about poetry of course. But there is no question for her that by the time 'attention' migrates to the poetic sphere in the Romantic movement, it is already saturated by protocols that had evolved under external pressure so that even an activity as entrenched as reading takes on a different disposition. The stakes of her study-and they are considerable-are laid out nicely at the beginning.....war is the repressed and poetry, in this case, an exquisite, intricate, humane form of repression-and attention.
William Galperin
Wordsworth Circle________________________________________
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