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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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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European Association for American Studies
2022-12-01
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| Series: | European Journal of American Studies |
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| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/19013 |
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| author | Zuzanna Ladyga |
| author_facet | Zuzanna Ladyga |
| author_sort | Zuzanna Ladyga |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | 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. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-30931ecee36b44cf80d5e4471a8927cf |
| institution | Kabale University |
| issn | 1991-9336 |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2022-12-01 |
| publisher | European Association for American Studies |
| record_format | Article |
| series | European Journal of American Studies |
| spelling | doaj-art-30931ecee36b44cf80d5e4471a8927cf2025-01-06T09:08:18ZengEuropean Association for American StudiesEuropean Journal of American Studies1991-93362022-12-0117410.4000/ejas.19013Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale KingZuzanna LadygaThe 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.https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/19013postmodernismboredomacediaDavid Foster Wallaceproductivitypublishing industry |
| spellingShingle | Zuzanna Ladyga Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King European Journal of American Studies postmodernism boredom acedia David Foster Wallace productivity publishing industry |
| title | Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King |
| title_full | Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King |
| title_fullStr | Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King |
| title_full_unstemmed | Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King |
| title_short | Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King |
| title_sort | acedia and david foster wallace s the pale king |
| topic | postmodernism boredom acedia David Foster Wallace productivity publishing industry |
| url | https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/19013 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT zuzannaladyga acediaanddavidfosterwallacesthepaleking |