Can students really not concentrate for 50 minutes any more?

Is constant interactivity really the only way to hold attention today?

Might it be that resisting the commodotisation and commercialisation of attention requires modes of resistance that are deeper than simply cutting with the grain of addictive modes of engagement?

It was in part in an effort to explore these questions in my own teaching that I made the lecture below for my students in the Literature and Modernism unit at Moansh University:

Beckett came at the end of the course, after weeks on André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Leonora Carrington, Lu Xun, Eileen Chang, Ding Ling, and Jean Rhys, and I refer back to some of these previous lectures in the course of my own.

There is talk in university circles these days of the lecture format being dead. I think that’s a naive view, like saying radio is dead because of the invention of television. So in addition to helping my students understand Beckett, I wanted to see what I could do with a 50 minute “lecture” slot under lockdown. I gave myself an afternoon and an evening to produce the finished product (which encoded overnight and was uploaded the next morning) from notes I had written in a previous year.

After receiving feedback from students who watched the “lecture”, I’m more convinced than ever that “young people” today are more than capable of sitting for 50 minutes and consuming information, providing it is presented with some thoughtfulness. To abandon the 50 minute concentration span is, in my opinion, to concede too much territory to a troubling ideology that assumes a thinking elite will manage the attention of the rest of the population for their own ends. Teaching students to have their attention managed by other people is a problematic way to prepare them to thrive in a world in which attention is a commodity that is viciously and expertly hoarded. Teaching students to manage their own attention and to focus for extended periods is, perhaps, one of the most empowering life lessons we can teach during their time with us, providing them with a significant bulwark against being manipulated in the years beyond university. I don’t know how well my video lecture does this, but it was my aim to provide a small nudge in that direction.

I also have to say that I find lecturing on Beckett exceedingly intense. What a powerful playwright he is! Krapp’s Last Tape powerfully raises questions about identity and time that are as pressing now as they were when the play premiered in 1958.

There’s also a podcast (audio only) version of the lecture available on Apple Podcasts, TuneIn and Spotify.