The Economy of Critical Attention: A Computational Analysis of Roland Barthes’s S/Z

Abstract

This article argues for the importance of analyzing distributions of literary-critical attention to understand the shape of our discipline and how it has evolved. The article sees critical attention as a scarce resource in literary economies, both within a single text and at much larger scales—even across time. Circulations of critical attention are directed by filtering models, a concept borrowed from cognitive psychology that refers to how competing demands for attention are prioritized. The accrual of critical attention implicitly signals the location of value in a literary economy. When this accrual (or lack thereof) is quantified using computational methodologies, we can track where critical attention goes, how much of it, and why. As a proof of this concept, the article offers a quantitative analysis of critical attention in Roland Barthes’s S/Z. This work reveals the hidden logics of Barthes’s distribution of critical attention and demonstrates how such analyses can identify the filtering models that operate in our critical tools and practices.