Bored As Hell: Reading Boredom in Modern Literature

Broadly situated in Boredom Studies, this dissertation examines depictions of boredom in modern literature. It aims to understand boredom outside of scientific explanatory models, which often produce a list of causes and effects in a diagnostic language. I ask, what can literary depictions of boredom tell us about boredom in a way that scientific explanations can’t? The texts examined feature characters stuck in a particular situation who are in pursuit of the question how to live. Under these circumstances, boredom emerges as a problem of hope or a desire to connect with the future. Organized under specific themes, chapters think with different theories of boredom and combine them with theories that are not typically considered in relation to boredom. The first chapter rethinks the relationship between work and boredom and offers a nuanced position. Drawing on Yusuf Atılgan, Fernando Pessoa, and Robert Walser, I argue that what boredom induced by work reveals is that the problem is not that we get bored, but how we get bored. The second chapter wrestles with the question of desire and death by focusing on Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. It reappraises Emma Bovary’s death as a refusal to die of boredom. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s approach to desire and Rita Felski’s consideration of female suicide in literature, it reflects on what it means to desire life and what it means to die of boredom. The third chapter examines Anton Chekhov’s plays, James Joyce’s Dubliners, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and explores what it means to be bored with life itself and complain about it. I bring Heidegger’s profound boredom together with Werner Hamacher’s essay on complaints and the Stoic exercise “therapeutic redescription.” I argue that complaints about life produce a (re)description of the past in the present moment in a way that erases the future while communicating a desire to connect with the future. With this study, I offer alternative ways to think about boredom and what it means to (re)connect with (one’s) life.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph D

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Comparative Literature

Grantor dc:publisher

The University of Western Ontario

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Copuroglu, Busra

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Plug, Jan

• Boredom
• Boredom Studies
• Comparative Literature
• Modern Literature
• Yusuf Atilgan
• Anton Chekhov
• Gustave Flaubert
• James Joyce
• Fernando Pessoa
• Robert Walser
• Virginia Woolf

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14721/38576

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uwo.scholaris.ca:20.500.14721/38576