Word: boredoms
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After all the misery, humiliation, boredom and drudgery, it appears the baseball strike may finally have done the sporting world some good...
Before this time the idea of boredom was not necessary for an understanding of existence: athough people in the early 18th century may have led lives which from our standpoint would appear boring, they did not think of them as such. Spacks traces the term's appearance and development as conjunctive with evolving concepts of the individual's place in society. The religiosity and community of pre-modern times, which discouraged individualism, gradually gave way to the fragmentation and alienation of modernity and post-modernity, which encourages individualism...
Some of Spacks' most interesting observations surround boredom in women's lives and fiction. In both the 18th and 19th centuries, women's lives were defined by predictable routine. Reading offered an escape, but the dangers implicit in that escape were well known: unless novels were written in accordance with an unyieldingly moral ideology they could engender in their readers unsalutory desires and vicissitudes of emotion. Yet women's actual existence--their good works, the various musical and artistic talents with which they embellished themselves, their letter-writing and social calls--offered little fodder for fiction, except in the hands...
...flaw of Spacks' book is that she protests too much: as if unsure of the validity of her thesis, she overwhelms us with putative evidence of the centrality of boredom as a phenomenon. This evidence often consists of veritable lists of the appearances of the word boring (in one of its forms) in the text under consideration, which proves indeed that boredom appears in the text, but not that it is what makes the text work...
...book's final chapter concentrates on the current state of boredom. Spacks observes, tellingly, that while a few centuries ago boredom was a term that had no currency, we now live in a society that encourages and produces ad copy like the following: "I gave up chocolates. I gave up espresso. I gave up the Count (that naughty man). And his little house in Cap Ferrat. The Waterman, however, is not negotiable. I must have something thrilling with which to record my boredom." Boredom: A Literary History of a State of Mind tells the interesting and significant story...