In taking “distraction” as a keyword, this panel draws from a foundation of literary scholarship that has interrogated the relationship between aesthetics and politics in attentional terms. These include Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique” (1917), Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood (1967), Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot (1992), Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception (2000), Alex Woloch’s The One vs the Many (2004), Caroline Levine’s Forms (2015). What all of these works share in common is a conviction that how works of art direct or fragment our attention is central to assessing their claims to political vs other forms of significance. This panel will consider the distractedness of realism from two standpoints: the ways in which the novel channels and curtails our attentional capacity and the novel’s representations of distracted states as openings for competing modes of meaning. Ultimately, it will ask what the novel’s investment in distraction means for it as a form: does it compromise the novel’s status as the central mode of literary perception or, on the contrary, affirm its structural plasticity and reinforce its historical resilience?

Each speaker will present for 12 minutes, with twenty minutes reserved for discussion. Beginning with John Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain (1848), Alexander Lynch proposes that distraction gives shape to the realist novel by virtue of distracting toward (rather than from) contingent, living sources of theological meaning. Aligning Bildung with doctrinal development, Lynch argues that the ‘reality’ at stake in a realist novel is not a quality inhering indifferently in represented situations so much as a donum or deposit that the novel’s distractions draw out and enrich.

Valeria Mutc will examine the perceived end of the high realist novel through its growing discomfort with distraction. Focusing on Leo Tolstoy’s fiction, Mutc will argue that the Russian novel viewed mentally distracted states as both the only source of metaphysical meaning and a structural flaw that weakened the novel’s capacity for observation, rendering it socially unconscious. Tolstoy sought to reconcile the two in theater by channeling the observational impulse toward the absorption of meaning. Ultimately, however, he rejected distraction as a source of novelistic meaning and concluded that the novel needed to cede some of its metaphysical sensitivity in order to become socially reparative.

Lizzie Mundell-Perkins’s paper focuses on “post-realist” fiction of the early twentieth century—works that were newly reckoning with the loss of narrative authority attainable in the 19th century novel. She complicates Alex Woloch’s seminal notion of “character space” as a means to systematically analyze a novel’s distribution of attention to individual characters in realist fiction. When one character is represented primarily via the thoughts and impressions of another, who are readers attending to? Through close-readings of James, Woolf, and Bowen, she illustrates how the constitution of multiple characters simultaneously in what she calls “negative character space” visibly distracts a novel’s authoritative hierarchization of its cast of characters. What are the narrative-ethical implications of such moments, when a novel calls attention to the slippage of characters from foreground to background (and vice versa)?

Finally, James Draney will frame distraction as a productive experience within contemporary realist fiction. By examining Rosalind Brown’s Practice (2024) and Jordan Castro’s The Novelist (2022), Draney will explore moments where the contemporary novel takes distraction—both formal and phenomenological—as a source of creative meaning. In so doing, he proposes, it shifts realism’s focus from depicting interiority to exploring the conditions that make inner life, especially fantasy, narratable. Ultimately, these novels recast distraction as a structuring problem for contemporary realism, reflecting how twenty-first-century life often blocks access to the spontaneous thinking we call free association.