'The uses of boredom': affect, attention, and absorption in the fiction of Don DeLillo. Issue 1 (2nd January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Manning, Nicholas
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 33:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: 155
• Page End: 173
• Publication Date: 2019-01-02
• Subjects: Absorption -- affect -- attention -- boredom -- Don DeLillo -- emotion -- empathy -- history -- novel; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2017.1308962
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In an increasingly stimulated and stimulating modernity, is it only the bored mind which is truly free? Does boredom constitute a fundamental dissolution of the distracted modern subject, in an unproductive disengagement from both world and self, or may it rather represent a paradoxically active rebellion against those sociopolitical forces which demand ever more intense modes of attention as a means of control? Rather than the efficacious protagonists of Romantic idealism or the homo faber of post-industrial enterprise, Don DeLillo's fiction frequently presents us with characters transformed into ambiguous spectators both of history and their own lives. Even bored spectators, however, are not necessarily passive beings: though their attention may waver into apparent apathy, though their bodies and minds may show signs of having disengaged, such disengagement, beyond a simply dispassionate lethargy, may be viewed as a meaningful backlash as much against the objects of their contemplation as its technologies of delivery and display. This paper explores paradigms of affect, attention, and absorption as a means of dealing with an unassimilable intensity, with special concentration on Don DeLillo's Players, White Noise, and Falling Man .