Editorial [PDF]
Christine Caruana, Elsa Fiott: University of Malta
“Let’s not deny that boredom is boring”: An Interview with Charlie Gere [PDF]
The antae Editorial Board: University of Malta
Is boredom inevitable? [PDF]
Nikolaus Lehner: University of Vienna
The article concerns the question whether boredom is inevitable. If, as Nietzsche claims, even the gods are at the mercy of boredom, does this mean that boredom is something we should get used to? It is suggested that the inevitability of boredom has several roots: the relation of the modern society to work and leisure, the existential experience of meaninglessness, modern technology and modern subjectivity. Indeed, the semantics of modern subjectivity, as Luhmann says, were born at the very moment when the semantics of ennui also emerged. This article suggests that consumer society is a reaction to the problem of boredom that stems from modern subjectivity. However, consumer society is not able to realise the utopian situation of a world without boredom, because it does not only seek to abolish boredom but it also fuels the concept of modern subjectivity. Nevertheless, before the appearance of consumerism, there have already been other tactics to cope with boredom, which also, ultimately, failed.
‘A succession of incomprehensible images’: Decoud, boredom and history in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo [PDF]
Oliver Neto: University of Bristol
In an early scene in Nostromo, Emilia Gould declares that ‘nothing ever happened’ in Sulaco. ‘Even the revolutions, of which there had been two in her time’, the narrator adds, ‘respected the repose of the place’. The sense of historical impasse in Sulaco, despite its tumultuous history, is part of what I will call Nostromo’s rhetoric of boredom. I will suggest that Conrad’s novel embodies this rhetoric through Martin Decoud, the ‘idle boulevardier’ who commits suicide when marooned with the Goulds’s silver. Decoud’s weary conception of the universe as ‘a succession of incomprehensible images’ marks him out as a familiar cultural trope: the Parisian flâneur. During the nineteenth-century, this famous figure was often depicted in the language of disengagement, despondency and fatigue that would become characteristic of modern boredom. By attributing these qualities to Decoud, Nostromo locates the sceptical and ahistorical philosophy that leads him to commit suicide within a specific historical context. Moreover, Nostromo’s narrative form often presents its content as ‘a succession of incomprehensible images’, depicting its characters’ perspective through the paratactic accumulation of inconsequential details. Thus, the historically-constituted experience conveyed through the rhetoric of boredom is further expressed through the novel’s dissonant mode of historical narration.
The Unruly Rules of the Game: Writing Game and Writing Practice in George Gissing's New Grub Street [PDF]
Ashar Foley: Stony Brook University
In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes likens the reader-writer relationship to a game, the play of which is made possible by the writer's imaginative seeking out of his reader, and the reader’s openness to being found. If each does his or her part—if neither bores the other—‘there can still be a game’. This model of writing and reading as exploratory, amorous gamesmanship is troubled by the literary equivalent of spectator sports, literature for a mass audience. According to this new model, described by Marshall McLuhan, ‘[w]ithout the audience, there is no game. It would be a practice’, a rehearsal without a play. Within mass culture, then, the game is determined not by the players’ mutual efforts to defer the rules, but by the presence of an anonymous public, well-versed in rule and convention before first pitch is thrown or first sentence is read. How one writes, or fails to write, in the context of this new configuration of the game is the main question posed in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). I contend that, while the novel’s successful writers play to audience demand, their counterparts yearn for a proper writing practice. Boredom marks the latter’s’ refusal of the new rules of the game, flagging the novel’s construction and allocation of artistic authenticity.
Gonçalo M. Tavares’s Uma Viagem à Índia and Bloom’s ‘definitive boredom’ [PDF]
Pedro Corga: University of Aveiro
Contemporary man is constantly looking for excitement and novelty in order to satisfy his ever-increasing demanding needs. The result is a sort of postmodern formula for the pursuit of happiness in the 21st century: a life punctuated by excesses that will ideally drown out the tedious, repetitive and mundane nature of the present. However, according to philosopher Lars Svendsen, “the transgression can never satisfy the longing from which it springs but inevitably makes even stronger” (Svendsen, 2001: 68). In the present article we will deal with the subject of contemporary boredom and his presence in Gonçao M. Tavares’ Uma Viagem à Índia (2010), already widely considered one of the most prolific and important books at the beginning of the century in both Portuguese and European contexts. Bloom, the main character, is someone who reveals an attitude of distrust and distance towards the world that surrounds him, carrying the burden of a profound feeling of boredom and a kind of ontological and metaphysical exhaustion which reflect the characteristic postmodern apathy, resignation and detachment.
On the Extrordinary: Problematisation, Flatness, and Repetition [PDF]
Manel Mula Ferrer: Goldsmiths, University of London
This article reflects on the meaning and connotations of “the extraordinary” as applied to a person’s life context. To do so, it transposes to a smaller scale different concepts from philosophy of history (such as the notion of repetition in Nietzsche and Freud). These are then mainly framed with artistic (literary) examples for its capability of moment-creation in order to examine the mere condition of possibility of the emergence of something extraordinary in the personal affective sphere. In the essay, the extraordinary is defined both as an unlikely probability within a system and a moment in which various potentialities unfold, but also as a moment of flat temporality. The three conceptualisations intertwine to describe a feeling of waiting for something to happen: the extraordinary becomes only possible by its own indictment, in a version of vitalism that invests the incitement of the moment with counter-boredom. Ultimately, boredom provides a way of thinking flatness as previous to the condition of possibility, thus understanding the extraordinary as resistance against the force that orients action towards illusionary horizons.
Cioran’s ‘grain of ataraxy’: Boredom, Nothingness, and Quietism [PDF]
James Farrugia: University of Malta
In reading E.M. Cioran’s œuvre, one is faced with an immediate and unremitting abrasiveness that has its roots with our being born into time. Indeed, the author of The Fall into Time and The Trouble with Being Born thought that it is precisely this accidental and unredeemable temporality, an original sin that results in a life forever situated in cycles of striving and becoming, which is to be exhuastingly apprehended in the experience of boredom: ‘Life is more and less than boredom, though it is in boredom and by boredom that we discern what life is worth.’ Cioran’s pessimism never relents; even his lugubrious friend Samuel Beckett had to keep a distance after finding him ‘too pessimistic’—who else but Cioran could write that ‘leukemia is the garden where God blooms’? Despite this, in Cioran’s often autobiographical, aphoristic and essayistic writings, we find a richly-timbred boredom (ironically so) which gives us incisive observations into a multitude of related concepts and realities. Nothingness, God, silence, mysticism, suffering, and quietism (among others) all feature in Cioran’s writings on boredom, as well as in this article’s attempt to better situate Cioran’s work with respect to his more famous pessimistic and existentialist relations’ take on the subject, namely Arthur Schopenhauer and Martin Heidegger. In exploring his work on boredom vis-à-vis his specific interest in mysticism, Taoism, nothingness, time and insomnia, this paper aims to show how the failure to attain what Cioran called ‘a grain of ataraxy’, necessarily presupposes a limited set of ‘possibilities’ and ‘prospects’ when faced with the experience of ‘the sensation of the emptiness of existence’ that is boredom (Schopenhauer).
‘Scale’—Conference Review [PDF]
Aaron Aquilina: Lancaster University
