Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King
The article makes the case for David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King as a literary intervention into the American ethos of productivity, which offers a critique of this ethos by exploiting the trope of acedia, or boredom. Wallace’s novel employs acedia as the mode of its subjectivity and its main the...
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| Vydáno v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ejas, |
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| Hlavní autor: | |
| Médium: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jazyk: | Anglais |
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European journal of American studies
2023
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| On-line přístup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Shrnutí: | The article makes the case for David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King as a literary intervention into the American ethos of productivity, which offers a critique of this ethos by exploiting the trope of acedia, or boredom. Wallace’s novel employs acedia as the mode of its subjectivity and its main theme, thus creating a unique, recursive aesthetics, which is resistant to “productive” interpretations. Following Wallace’s own vocabulary, I call this aesthetics “the aesthetics of the feedback glare.” As a result of its recursive dynamics, the novel creates a series of micro-events. They can be classified as what Lauren Berlant calls “self-interruptions”: the events that guard the heterotopic territory of the subject’s (as well as the author’s) agency against interpellative calls of the book industry for self-exploitation and productivity. |
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