Boredom

Listening to Nothing in Particular: Boredom and Contemporary Experimental Music

by eldritch Priest

"Listening to Nothing in Particular" examines contemporary boredom through the lens of recent experimental... more "Listening to Nothing in Particular" examines contemporary boredom through the lens of recent experimental composition. While boredom is typically treated in the arts as a conceit of transcendence or radical indifference, this essay argues that the mood in contemporary post- Cagean compositional practices articulate a much more ambivalent feeling of being unjustified, a feeling whose low-level intensity is largely indistinguishable from the spins and stalls of everyday life. Drawing on Sianne Ngai's notion of the "stuplime," a stilted and undecidable response to expressions of an infinitely iterated finitude, and evoking alternative ways of suffering the passion of waiting, "Listening to Nothing in Particular" focuses the scattered rays of boredom on a conflict between contemporary culture's shrunken curiosity and its imperatives for constant individual self-invention.

Free Time / Freeing Time: In Praise of Boredom and Uncertainty (Part II)

by Acacia Warwick

Towards Sensor-Free Affect Detection in Cognitive Tutor Algebra

by Jaclyn Ocumpaugh

Co-authored with: S.J.d. Baker, Ryan, Sujith M. Gowda, Michael Wixon, Jessica Kalka, Angela Z. Wagner, Aatish Salvi, Vincent Aleven, Gail W. Kusbit, and Lisa Rossi.  For the 5th International Conference on Educational Data Mining.

Langeweile

by Heike Klippel

Klippel, Heike: Langeweile. In: Agora42, Nr. 3, 2010, p. 46-49.

2011 “The Politics of Boredom,” Anthropology News, 52(7): 36-37.

by Bruce O'Neill

The Other Side of Existence: Heidegger on Boredom

by Jan Slaby

Walking the Dog – David Hughes

by Greice Schneider

Sometimes boredom can be interesting, as in the case of David Hughes’s book, Walking the Dog. In this contribution,... more Sometimes boredom can be interesting, as in the case of David Hughes’s book, Walking the Dog. In this contribution, Greice Schneider addresses the challenges posed by the experience of reading this multifaceted work that stretches the “dialectics of repetition and difference”.

"The Strategic Unity of Heidegger's The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics"

by Kate Withy

Forthcoming in the Southern Journal of Philosophy

This paper unifies the disparate analyses in Heidegger’s lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics:... more This paper unifies the disparate analyses in Heidegger’s lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, in a single therapeutic and philosophical project. By taking seriously the text’s claim to lead us towards authenticity, I show how Heidegger’s analysis of boredom works together with his comparative analysis of man and animal to diagnose and lead us out of our contemporary complacency about being. This reading puts both analyses in a new light, reveals the hidden strategic unity of the lecture course, and brings out the therapeutic dimension of Heidegger’s phenomenology.

Essays on Boredom and Modernity by Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani (eds.) [book review]

by Julian Jason Haladyn

Space and Culture (May 2010)

Part of the Critical Studies series at Rodolpi, Essays on Boredom and Modernity examines “the phenomenon of boredom... more Part of the Critical Studies series at Rodolpi, Essays on Boredom and Modernity examines “the phenomenon of boredom from a multidisciplinary perspective,” as Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani state in their introduction, an approach that facilitates a diverse recognition of boredom as an “interpretive category” of modernity (p.22).

Psychogeographical Boredom

by Julian Jason Haladyn

Drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture 5.2 (Psychogeography, October 2008): <http://www.drainmag.com&gt;

This text considers the occurrence of boredom within the psychogeographical practices of the Situationist... more This text considers the occurrence of boredom within the psychogeographical practices of the Situationist International, with a particular focus on the work of Guy Debord.

Empire of Boring: The Unbearable Duration of Andy Warhol’s Films

by Julian Jason Haladyn

Kinema: A Journal of Film and Audiovisual Media 35 (Spring 2011): 105-113

In his 1965 film Poor Little Rich Girl, Andy Warhol presents a motionless shot of Edie Sedgwick engaged in a series of... more In his 1965 film Poor Little Rich Girl, Andy Warhol presents a motionless shot of Edie Sedgwick engaged in a series of everyday activities – talking on the telephone, modeling a new coat, and the like – the first 33-minutes of which is presented out of focus. Having watched a number of Warhol’s films, this opening sequence of formless shapes and disembodied voices stands out as the most difficult time I have spent attempting to “watch” a film. The difficulty with viewing Warhol’s films in general stems from his employment of structuralist tactics, specifically filming with a static camera, using long-takes and not editing the film. In the case of Poor Little Rich Girl, Warhol switched on the camera and walked away, leaving the image out of focus until he changed reels, at which point the focus was reinstated before he again walked away. Viewers may wish to read meaning into this absence of focus – interpreting this visible blur or blank as a representation of the unattainable dream of cinema – but Warhol actively undermines the possibility of believing that this meaning is intentional or part of the “purpose” of the scene. Given his working process, there is little doubt that this 33-minute blur of unfocused imagery is the result of a careless accident, which Warhol chose to leave as part of the final film. Through his working process, Warhol problematizes the experience of filmic temporality by exaggerating viewers’ experiences of duration.

Die Rolle der Fachwertschätzung für Freude, Langeweile und Angst im Fach Französisch. Eine mehrebenenanalytische Längsschnittstudie über die …

by Christian Beermann

Boredom, repetition, inertia: contemporary photography and the aesthetics of the banal

by Eugenie Shinkle

The definition, assessment, and mitigation of state boredom within educational settings: A comprehensive review

by Logan Fiorella

Published in Educational Psychology Review

The Joy and the Burden of the Comics Artist: The role of boredom in the production of comics

by Greice Schneider

Published ar The Comics Forum

There is something very intriguing in the high incidence of comics about cartoonists whining about the struggle of... more There is something very intriguing in the high incidence of comics about cartoonists whining about the struggle of their métier, especially in the realm of alternative comics, in which the combination of autobiography and a tendency towards a depressive mood has been setting the tone in the last decades. In fact, the idea that many ‘alternative comics’ feature stories in which ‘autobiography would be the mode’ while ‘neurosis and alienation the dominant tone’ (Leith) is so well spread that it has become almost a genre in itself. It is not a coincidence that these two elements appear together, though. There is a connection between the subject (the routine of making comics) and the mood it awakens (most of the time, self-deprecating, depressing) that is directly related to the tricky dynamics of boredom and interest in the creative process: making comics appears both as the escape from boredom and the source of it. Although the role played by boredom and melancholy has been addressed in many arts, there seems to be something special with comics, given the high number of artists that bring up this topic in their work, such as Lewis Trondheim, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes or Ivan Brunetti.

Van Tilburg, W. A. P., & Igou, E. R. (in press b). On boredom and social identity: A pragmatic meaning-regulation approach. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

by Eric R. Igou

Van Tilburg, W. A. P., & Igou, E. R. (in press a). On boredom: Lack of challenge and meaning as distinct boredom experiences. Motivation & Emotion.

by Eric R. Igou

Urban Life, Urbane Desires: Boredom, Subjectivity, and Playing Jazz in Post-Communist Sofia

by Ryan McCormack

Dissertation, Chapter 4. An abbreviated version of this document was given at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Los Angeles, CA, November 11-14, 2010.

Comics and Everyday Life: from Ennui to Contemplation

by Greice Schneider

European Comic Art, v. 3, p. 37-64, 2010

This paper discusses the recent growing presence of the everyday in comics from different traditions, works where... more This paper discusses the recent growing presence of the everyday in comics from different traditions, works where ordinary situations and apparently insignificant events take the place of extraordinary worlds and adventure stories. Drawing predominantly from the French perspective of Everyday Studies (Lefebvre, Blanchot, Perec, De Certeau), the ambiguous dynamics of the everyday will be here studied in relation to the contrasting concepts of boredom and strangeness. This paper addresses not only comics that bring these two attitudes as a theme, but also those which manage to awaken emotional responses in the reader, specifically ennui and contemplation. The aim here is to identify different strategies proper to the language of comics capable of arousing everyday moods in the reading experience, particularly in those cases where the temporal dimension is manipulated, reinforcing a sense of slowness.

Agency, Life Extension and the Meaning of Life

by Lisa Bortolotti

Published in the Monist, 2010.

Contemporary philosophers and bioethicists argue that life extension
is bad for the individual.According to the... more Contemporary philosophers and bioethicists argue that life extension
is bad for the individual.According to the agency objection to life extension,
being constrained as an agent adds to the meaningfulness of human life.
Life extension removes constraints, and thus it deprives life of meaning.

In the paper, I concede that constrained agency contributes to the meaningfulness of human life, but reject the agency objection to life extension in its current form. Even in an extended life, decision-making remains constrained, and many obstacles to the fulfilment of an agent’s goals are preserved. Agents with longer lives are also presented with new challenges: for instance, it might be harder for them to avoid chronic boredom, and sustain their motivation to act in the pursuit of their goals.

Although objections from agency and boredom are often used in combination to support the view that a much longer life is likely to bring misery or become meaningless, I argue that the acceptance of the boredom objection undermines the persuasiveness of the agency objection.