Abstract

Previous studies have defined boredom either sociologically, as an epiphenomenon of modernization, or philosophically, as a perennial feature of human existence. By treating literary, historical, and philosophical representations of boredom as elements of a complex discourse evolving through time, the present work mediates between these approaches, neither abstracting boredom from its cultural context so that it appears to be the experience of a disembodied, ahistorical subject nor reducing it to that context and thereby dismissing the philosophical questions boredom raises. ;The first two chapters of Part I, "The Rhetoric of Experience," contrast paradigmatic examples of the philosophical and sociological approaches to boredom to reveal their complementary limitations. Chapter 3, "Boredom as Critique: Flaubert, Baudelaire and the Modernization of Subjectivity," uses a synthetic method to analyze how the discourse on boredom that registered the disillusionment and disaffection brought about by the historic transformations underway in nineteenth-century France links existential questions to the material effects of modernization. ;Part II, "The Rhetoric of Reflection," argues for an interpretation of boredom as a manifestation of the democratization of skepticism in modernity. "Boredom" epitomizes the dilemma of the subject for whom enlightenment and scientific progress have caused, in Max Weber's term, the "disenchantment" of the world, yet it comes to be lived as a pseudo-religious revelation of the ultimate meaninglessness of existence. Articulating Georg Simmel's phenomenological sociology with Martin Heidegger's existential analytics of mood, Chapters 4 and 5 develop a concept of boredom that grasps this nihilistic dynamic of the experience historically. Boredom is a lived metaphor for the dilemmas of subjective existence in a world where skepticism has been democratized. ;Chapter 6 reads The Man without Qualities as an attempt to develop a language for reflection on subjective experience which overcomes the aporiai of the boredom discourse. Mediating historically between sociological and philosophical vocabularies, Robert Musil's ironic representation of modern "experience without qualities" locates the possibility of reflectively transcending the nihilistic tendency of the modern subject within the very radical skepticism produced by cultural modernization