“Distraction” is a buzzword in modern culture, and rightly so: focus becomes so difficult when we’re bombarded from all sides with notifications, updates, and pings. But was it so different in the age before Google and TikTok? In this three-way conversation, Gage McWeeny, Professor and Chair in the English Department at Williams College; Debra Gettelman, Associate Professor of English at College of the Holy Cross; and Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Clark, draw on examples from visual art and literature to show that attention, distraction, and daydreaming were already hot-button topics in the nineteenth century.

Gage McWeeny's course, Attention / Distraction, is being offered at Williams College in spring 2026. Debra Gettelman is the author of Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels (Princeton, 2024). Anne Leonard has published on the topic of looking and listening in nineteenth-century France.

Image: Barbour, Woman Reading (detail), c. 1910, oil on millboard. The Clark, 1955.638