Bakhtin, Boredom, and the 'Democratization of Skepticism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4846925 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael E Gardiner (Department of Sociology, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada), Michael Gardiner (0000-0003-4727-7181, Western University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 163-184 |
| Publication date | 2017-02-17 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The European Legacy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1084-8770 • E-ISSN: 1470-1316 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10848770.2016.1262091 |
| OpenAlex | W2559703259 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 20 |
This article examines recent scholarly work on boredom by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of modernity, irony, and mass skepticism. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin noted that, beginning in the 1840s, Western societies had been gripped by an “epidemic of boredom.” He was referring to a peculiarly modern form of mass boredom, associated with the “atrophy of experience” in a mechanized and urbanized social life—a boredom Elizabeth S. Goodstein has characterized as the “democratization of skepticism.” Although Bakhtin says little about “boredom” directly, he probes the sociocultural conditions that give rise to it. Bakhtin, for example, celebrates the liberatory and egalitarian promise of modern vernacular speech, which displays a healthy suspicion of “monotonic” qualities of elite genres, and which springs not from the pulpit or the palace, but from the street, the marketplace and the public square. Bakhtin is concerned about the nihilistic implications of this disenchantment of the world and the threats it poses—indifference, reification and alienation—to the “participative” mode of social life he favours
Aesthetics · Art · Boredom · Democracy · Democratization · Disenchantment · Epistemology · Literature · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Skepticism · Sociology · Law · Linguistics and Education Research · Literature, Culture, and Criticism · Philosophy · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies
Art and Answerability
Experience Without Qualities
Toward a Philosophy of the Act
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
Futures Past
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
The Rhythmanalytical Project
Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870-1923
The Everyday and Everydayness
Rethinking Bakhtin
Boredom and the Religious Imagination
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism
Simmel on culture
The Heroic Life and Everyday Life
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,17 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2020 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |