Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King1
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6188490 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Zuzanna Ładyga (0000-0002-1680-7365, University of Warsaw, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Publication date | 2022-12-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1991-9336 • E-ISSN: 1991-9336 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/ejas.19013 |
| OpenAlex | W4315781911 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 14 |
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
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Boredom · Epistemology · Ethos · Guard (computer science · Linguistics · Literature · Sociology · Subject (documents · Subjectivity · Theme (computing · Computer Science · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Short Stories in Global Literature
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |