LAUSR

when one’s con stituents are more concerned about ‘real world’ issues like jobs and immigration?” We see, with no small amount of trepidation, how objects of attention deemed less important can become less “real.” But Phillips emphatically rejects Jonathan Gotschall’s insistence that the best way for literary studies to stay relevant is to hitch its cart to the sciences. Distraction insists that we have much to teach neuroscientists, for we are uniquely posi tioned to explore how reading has always been multifocal, and that divided attention is nothing new. Perhaps most crucially, what we have to share is our discipline’s acute distrust of progressive models in which something like distraction is assumed to increase over time. As Phillips’s book reveals, eighteenth-century readers and writers were, if anything, even more aware of how a culture’s attentional blind spots—what we unthinkingly assume to be worthy or unworthy of focus—might alter what counts as truth or fi ction, and create in their wake both alternative realities and alternative facts.