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Notes
1. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1952), 11. 2. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 57. 3. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 58

Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Edited by Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 232 pp. $71.30. In the introduction to Essays on Boredom and Modernity, editors Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani argue that the invention of the term boredom in the seventeenth century signals the emergence of a new rhetoric of experience in nascent modernity. With the appearance of a vast number of novel stimuli and a general shift in the individuals relation to time, modernitys industrialization, urbanization, and mass communication allow for the incorporation of boredom as a factor in the construction of experience and the construction of the experiencing self. Providing an insightful historical account of the topic by rehearsing the etymological connections between ennui, acedia, melancholy, spleen, and taedium vitae, among others, Dalle Pezze and Salzani make clear that describing boredom as inherently linked to modernity is of primary importance: This connection must be made explicit, they tell us, especially because boredoms nihilism tends to see itself as a timeless feature of the human soul and to efface its historicity (7). This historical contextualizing of boredom is necessary because the term only appears when it does to describe a shift in epistemology: The invention of the new concept of boredom in the eighteenth century allowed for the articulation of new ways of understanding the world (11). At issue here is a historicizing of the modern subject and the constitutive role of boredom in this process. We are prepared to read the essays that follow as arguments for apprehending the signicance of boredom for a modern worldview. Following this line of inquiry, several essays in the collection provide particularly insightful commentary on the function of boredom in various moments of modernity. In his Metaphysics and the Mood of Deep Boredom, Matthew Boss provides an impressively clear description of Heideggers use of the concept of boredom in his phenomenology of time. Though more far-reaching connections to elds beyond philosophy are not specied, Heideggers extensive inuence on twentieth-century thought
comparative literature studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2011. Copyright 2011 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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implies an important cultural function for boredom and other moods, in contrast to the more traditional emphasis on logic as the grounds of metaphysics. Salzanis The Atrophy of Experience provides a similarly rigorous analysis of Walter Benjamins division of experience into the premodern sense of Erfahrung and the more fragmented immediacy of Erlebnis, a symptom of modern society and a condition in which boredom becomes inescapable. For Benjamin, Salzani contends, boredom in modernity takes on a redemptive potentiality that makes of it an instrument of revolution (144). Here, the symptom of boredom as ineluctable passivity in modernity becomes a means of individual agency. This gesture toward a more broadly affective description of boredom is carried over in Marco van Leeuwens The Digital Void, which extends Benjamins discussion of aura to the mass digitization of contemporary culture. In contrast to the often readily accepted notion that the aura is dead, van Leeuwen suggests that auratic experience is both subjective and constructed rather than essential or authentic. Like Isis I. Leslies From Idleness to Boredom, which convincingly links boredom to the contemporary loss of political, public selfhood, van Leeuwens essay treats boredom as an ailment in direct contrast to Salzanis and Bosss essays. Though the essay relies perhaps too heavily on essential distinctions (real/virtual, authentic/inauthentic) in a context that has called into question the value of such distinctions, van Leeuwens investigation of aura as persistently evolving in contemporary culture establishes an important line of interrogation. Taking a term such as boredom as the focus of what the editors describe as a multidisciplinary and heterogeneous collection (though ve of the nine contributors work in the eld of philosophy) poses a number of problems, not the least of which is the difculty in dening the term in a way that provides a viable interpretive gure. Several essays here rely on seemingly incommensurable denitions; this is telling, particularly as nearly all the essays discuss boredom in some implicit or explicit connection to metaphysics. Rachel June Torbetts The Quick and the Flat: Walter Benjamin, Werner Herzog, for instance, gures boredom, at least in Herzogs lms, as in the end wholly ambiguous yet disruptive to the modern moment, while William McDonalds Kierkegaards Demonic Boredom takes up Kierkegaards argument that modern boredom reveals a spiritual lack and must be overcome through ethical practice. James Phillipss Becketts Boredom sees boredom as signaling a perhaps insuperable rift between art and metaphysics, while Joseph Bodens The Devil Inside: Boredom Proneness and Impulsive Behaviour describes boredom wholly in terms of

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pathology. Can such distinct boredoms contribute to a clearly circumscribed discourse? Salzani and Dalle Pezze argue that what nally holds these essays together and makes for the cohesiveness of this collection is in fact the pervasiveness of the phenomenon in many aspects of our lives, cultures and societies, and in a number of scholarly discourses (21). The intent to put emphasis on the centrality of boredom as a general interpretive category and to stress not only its signicance for the comprehension of contemporary society but also its presence in various and heterogeneous scholarly discourses is well conceived (21), though the vastly different characteristics and consequences of boredom in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Beckett, and Benjamin, in digital culture, and neuropsychologyall topics covered in this collectionplace at a seemingly irrecoverable distance a clear sense of the connection between modernity and boredom that the collection is attempting to investigate. Each of the essays collected here provides insight into the function of boredom in the authors chosen eld of inquiry, but the editors desire to have the collection congure a broad and at least broadly coherent interpretive category is encumbered by the reliance on a xed and apparently unproblematic idea of modernity as referring to the Western world from Baudelaire, with whom the editors begin, to the present day. For a collection wishing to situate boredom as a concept signally signicant to a particular time, little space is devoted to the always contested term modernity. Perhaps emblematic of this oversight and the difculties it raises, the editors introduction locates the invention of the term boredomand, according to their fundamental argument, modernity itselfin the seventeenth (5) and nineteenth centuries (10), though the concept of boredom is dated to the eighteenth (11). The introduction to Essays on Boredom and Modernity lays a compellingly ambitious foundation for this project, and the individual essays provide insight into the role of boredom in the delineation and development of discrete elds of inquiry; however, the collection as a whole struggles to nd the dialogic possibilities in the term boredom beyond the vagaries of pervasiveness with regard to these different elds. Though the editors acknowledge the potentially problematic scope of the project, a means of discovering a common thread in essays discussing topics from Kierkegaard to text messaging, all under the apparently unproblematic mantle of modernity, remains implicit at best. Salzani cites one of Walter Benjamins descriptions of boredom: We are bored when we dont know what we are waiting for. That we do know, or think we know, is nearly always the

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expression of our superciality or inattention. The difculty in adumbrating a discourse on boredoma difculty this collection reveals in its own performance of Benjaminian boredomsuggests that we address boredom as a eld of multiplicities rather than a pervasive singularity. The essays engage important if not always original topics, but the inclusive discourse sought remains elusive. In addition, ones attention to the ne points of many of the arguments presented here is often distracted by a disappointing lack of proofreading throughout the collection. In addition to the confusion surrounding the introduction of the term boredom in English, there are numerous errors in spelling, grammar, and syntax throughout. Brendan J. Balint DYouville College

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