RELST 3540

On Paying Attention

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.

In the age of smartphones and social media, it's a cliché to say that the competing claims made on our attention only seem to be multiplying. But a cliché can be true. This course is an opportunity to enact certain practices of attentiveness and concentration, drawing largely from religious, literary, artistic, philosophical sources. We'll be trying to slow down our normal critical processes, to suspend the appropriative, pragmatic, and goal-oriented nature of much of the modern university. Through various exercises, from memorizing poems to immersing ourselves in our surroundings to reading about the ways in which our senses reach out to the world, we'll try to make ourselves more attentively available to that world.

When Offered Spring.

Distribution Category (ETM-AS) (KCM-AG)

Comments Conducted in English. This course is for students of all levels and backgrounds: anyone who wishes that college were slower, more thoughtful, more about life's big questions.

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