Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind [Hardcover]

Patricia Meyer Spacks (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226768538 | ISBN-13: 978-0226768533 | Publication Date: February 7, 1995 | Edition: 1

This book offers a witty explanation of why boredom both haunts and motivates the literary imagination. Moving from Samuel Johnson to Donald Barthelme, from Jane Austen to Anita Brookner, Spacks shows us at last how we arrived in a postmodern world where boredom is the all-encompassing name we give our discontent. Her book, anything but boring, gives us new insight into the cultural usefulness—and deep interest—of boredom as a state of mind.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In this fascinating study of the trope of boredom in fiction and the reality of boredom in life, Spakes, a scholar of 18th-century literature, shows how writers use boredom as a metonym for an ethical stance. Thus, Samuel Johnson regards boredom as a personal flaw to be resisted by the individual sufferer. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads equates the reader's interest with the moral imagination. Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte depict the boring female life of the 19th century to argue against the restrictions society placed on women. Thackeray's Vanity Fair finds boredom preferable to Becky Sharp's evil. Baudelaire maintains that the sensitive soul is bored by society's corruption, and Anita Brookner extends the modernist view to depict life as inherently boring. Spacks offers fine close readings and trenchant social commentary. She presents material that will interest social historians as well as students of literature from the 18th to the 20th century.
Joseph Rosenblum, Guilford Technical Community Coll., Jamestown, N.C.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The author of Gossip (1986) tackles the subject of boredom in this lively and unusual treatise. Spacks analyzes the evolution of boredom as both a cultural and literary phenomenon during the course of the last three centuries. Fascinating examinations of boredom as a moral proposition, an ethical dilemma, a catalyst for the imagination, and a precursor to literary innovation are provided. According to the author, the psychic, social, and literary merits and implications of boredom are manifest in daily life and have helped determine the shape and the direction of modern society. Anything but dull, this engaging narrative offers an original and enlightening perspective on a much maligned and misunderstood state of mind. Margaret Flanagan

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (February 7, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226768538
• ISBN-13: 978-0226768533
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,280,459 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Chronic boredom: a much needed female perspective, March 8, 1998

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[e-mail] (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Hardcover)

After researching the topic of chronic boredom myself for the past four years it was gratifying to finally come accross a text that dealt with the problem from the perspective of women writers, thinkers and culture critics from the Enlightenment on. The great literary text on the topic by Reinhard Kuhn 'The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature' did not deal with much of the material here covered by Spacks - though it dealt with just about everything else associated with the topic. Spacks' treatment of the topic mixes analysis of high literary texts with analysis of other cultural discourses often ignored by the traditional modernist culture critic. The consequence is that the voices of hundreds of women - and not merely middle and upperclass women - who have suffered from the malady since the 18th century are heard for the first time. But Spacks' work offers much more to the reader than a female perspective on an old malaise. Her particular emphasis is delivered within the broad tradition of writings on the topic and as such she never loses the overview. Her work provides a scholarly reinterpretation of this much underestimated phenomenon. Chronic boredom, as Healy, Kuhn, Klapp, George Steiner and now Spack's tells us, is one of the great maladies of the twentieth century. At its worst it is one of the most crippling 'maladies of the subject' and clearly, as Spacks seems to suggest, it is often generated by oppressive (subtly or otherwise) social structures. To read Spacks' work alongside Kuhn's is to gain a full overview of a malaise that has been with us since Lucretius and Seneca, but which threatens, more than ever before, to sap personal and social existence of all meaning, and spirit (elan vitale). Spacks' work does not bore, however. Why? Because her tone of high seriousness reveals to the reader something insidious and disturbing about our postmodern social structures.We are confronted in the text with a malign social something masquerading as something innocuous and harmless, mre 'boredom'. Chronic forms of boredom can be vicious and life threatening - both for individuals and for societies. Spacks', more than any other writer on the topic, comes close to linking the problem to terms like 'oppression', 'trauma', 'alienation', disenchantment',' angst' and so on. This her inheritance from feminist and postmodern critical discourses. We are in the mainstream of modernist/psotmodernist discourses on culture and the' crisis of subjectivity'. As TS. Eliot once commented, chronic ennui is a modern form of the great medieval scourge of 'acedia', and acedia, we gleen from the medieval texts, was capable of utterly destroying the psychic and spiritual world's of its victims.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Anything but boring, October 18, 2002

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"bibliophile_ca" (Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Hardcover)

This book is anything but boring; it's one of the most fascinating I've read in a long time. Spacks examines the idea of boredom, its genesis and implications, and forces readers to acknowledge that it is a culturally constructed concept, not a naturally occurring one. She historicises the word and the assumptions about the world that it reflects. The fact that most of us can't conceive of the world or our response to it without this category of experience only reinforces her point of how much it has become naturalised. But it reinforces a deadening passivity in our experience of life. The statement "I'm bored!" says much more about the person who is bored than it says about the ostensible cause of the boredom. Read Spacks and learn to pay active attention again.

3.0 out of 5 stars good, July 9, 2011

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HK - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Hardcover)

The book was a little more shabby than I expected for "good", but for this prize it was OK and the package/postage reliable and fast.