Moderator: Leela Gandhi, Department of English, Brown University Rita Felski, University of Virginia – “Getting it: Art and Attunement” How does one "get" or fail to "get" a work of art? Can we do justice to what such a response feels like and why it matters--yet without scanting the prompts and pressures that incline us toward some works rather than others? Perhaps attunement will give us a fresh slant on such questions. Matt Bevis, Keble College/Oxford University – “On Distraction” ‘We speak of reading a newspaper, we speak of reading a poem’, Geoffrey Hill observed. ‘If what you do with a newspaper is called reading then what you do with a poem should be described in a different way. It is an act of passionate attention.’ But reading poems may also be a form of passionate distraction, and distraction can itself be a kind of attentiveness. I want to look at a handful of poems (by Wordsworth, Ashbery, and others) and to consider how certain lyrical forms drive us to distraction—and why we might want them to. Along the way I’ll be pondering the provocations of Roland Barthes’s confession: ‘To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas.' Brown University Aril 8, 2017

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