Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani (eds.) 2009. Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodolpi. 227 pp. ISBN 978-90-420-2566-0.
Reviewed by Julian Jason Haladyn, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Part of the Critical Studies series at Rodolpi, Essays on Boredom and Modernity examines “the phenomenon of boredom from a multidisciplinary perspective,” as Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani state in their introduction, an approach that facilitates a diverse recognition of boredom as an “interpretive category” of modernity (p.22). The connection between boredom and modernity has been developed in a number of previous studies, the most comprehensive of which is Elizabeth Goodstein’s Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (2005), a source that Pezze and Salzani heavily draw upon in the framing of this volume. In fact, this collection brings together much of the preexisting literature on boredom from a variety of disciplines, allowing for a comparative reading or dialogue between the often distinct views of this modern affect.
cc image credit: Boredom by AliceNWondrlnd
The book comprises an introduction and eight essays, each exploring the concept of boredom from different conceptual or historical perspectives. Isis I. Leslie’s “From Idleness to Boredom: On the Historical Development of Modern Boredom” represents the most general of the texts, opening the collection with a broad overview of the subject at hand. For readers not acquainted with boredom and its relationship to earlier cultural maladies, most notably acedia or apathy, this essay along with the introduction provide invaluable information for contextualizing the importance of the topic; for those already familiar with the intricacies of boredom, these two texts primarily restate a relatively standard history. The following four essays centre around historical figures interested in boredom, such as William McDonald’s look at Kierkegaard, Matthew Boss’ analysis of Heidegger, James Phillips’ discussion of Beckett, and Carlo Salzani’s reading of Benjamin. Of these I personally found the examinations of Kierkegaard and Benjamin most engaging because of the way the authors use boredom to frame the cultural and historical shifts that are at the heart of Kierkegaard’s discourse on belief and secularization and Benjamin’s examination of meaning and history in mass cultural artifacts. All four historical readings none-the-less provide a broad range of possible approaches and understandings of the importance of boredom to modernity.
The final three essays in the collection are more difficult to categorize. Rachel June Torbet’s “The Quick and the Flat: Walter Benjamin, Werner Herzog” is a comparative analysis that looks at the films of Herzog through the lens of Benjamin’s conception of boredom – although, to be honest, Herzog is more than a little short changed. This was one of the texts I found most enjoyable in the collection because of the unique approach taken by Torbet, who rather wittily submits the often overzealous or even plainly tyrannical Herzog to a Benjaminian reading of boredom. In a similar comparative way of looking at boredom, Marco Van Leeuwen’s “The Digital Void: e-NNUI and experience” focuses on the relationship between prevailing views of digital media, again with a Benjaminian flair, and boredom as a failure or inability to interact with people. Although an interesting approach, this text only manages to touch on a series of ideas that require considerable more examination in order to demonstrate this particular reading of boredom within an age of computer interactions. The final text in the collection, Joseph Boden’s “The Devil Inside: Boredom Proneness and Impulsive Behaviour,” is an anomaly. Although the focus of the editors was a multidisciplinary perspective, all the texts to this point have been relatively situated within the realm of cultural theory and practice. Boden’s essay is not simply a departure from this framework but, from my reading, is irreconcilable with the rest of the book. The text comes out of a parallel history of boredom as a psychological condition that is both documented and studied, and in fact arguably has roots in the writing of Kierkegaard, but, since this is the single example of this stream of study, it stands out as a disciplined approach unlike the rest of the volume.
As someone familiar with the major studies on boredom, I found this book to be an engaging introductory text that presents many of the major ideas and historical discussions of this modern phenomenon. Read in conjunction with sources like Goodstein, Essays on Boredom and Modernity can be seen as adding a level of diversity and variation to existing explorations of boredom, which in turn open us new means of interpreting modern and even postmodern views of the world. What is particularly interesting about this book is the cultural vision of modernity that is collectively constructed through this variety of engagements with boredom, one that speaks to the fragmentary and often contradictory experiences of modern culture.
Works Cited
Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.