"Compared to previous studies (including one that came out during the project lifetime: ""Distraction; Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature"", by N.M. Phillips, John Hopkins University Press, 2016), this research engaged in a more comprehensive and systematic inquiry, with two specific elements of newness.
On the one hand, distraction was considered in all its manifold aspects (ethical-moral, aesthetic-cognitive and stylistic-literary): that is why the research intentionally covered a plurality of concepts – including divertissement, rêverie, diversion, and digression, which, albeit originating in different fields, form nonetheless a homogeneous semantic constellation.
On the other hand, the research adopted a historical perspective, in order to tackle theoretical questions, and vice versa. Its methodology was essentially multidisciplinary, and it combined knowledge and tools from History of Philosophy, History of Ideas, Literary studies, Aesthetics, and Comparative Literature, together with a systematic dialogue with contemporary theory.
This project represented a substantial contribution in the field also for its broad chronological and geographic borders, allowing to better stress phenomena of continuity/fracture in the long run.
By adopting a transnational viewpoint and by focusing on the French and Italian linguistic and cultural domains, this research challenged the dominating Anglo- and German-centric narratives about pre-Romanticism and Romanticism, which is implicitly assumed by some of the previous studies.
Finally, contrary to contemporary views of distraction, often reiterating its traditionally-constructed negative character (e.g. by viewing it as a consequence of crisis and moral disintegration, or as the effect of post-capitalist manipulations of consciousness), this research explored distraction as a vector of emancipation and transformation, that is to say, as the condition for a form of experience that can play a subversive role, enable a deepening of ordinary experience, and operate as a vector of knowledge. This this the major potential impact of the project to a wider audience outside academia, where it can help challenging crucial issues of contemporary society.
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