The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature / / Zuzanna Ladyga.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Complete eBook-Package 2019
• VerfasserIn: Ladyga, Zuzanna,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century : MALN20C
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (296 p.)

Analyses the theme of laziness in twentieth-century American LiteratureUncovers the ethical dimension of the writing of Stein, Hemingway, Barth, Barthelme and Wallace by situating them in the context of the 20th century non-normative ethical and aesthetic traditionShows how the Romantic interest in laziness plays out through the modernist and postmodernist moments in 20th century American literatureOffers an innovative model of ethical reading based on the concept of unproductivity as an alternative to the dominant post-Romantic trends in the field of ethical criticismPresents the first comprehensive study of laziness as a theoretical concept, which draws on a range of religious and philosophical references points, spanning John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Catherine MalabouThe Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature focuses on the issue of productivity, using the figure of laziness to negotiate the relation between the ethical and the aesthetic. This book argues that major twentieth-century American writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and David Foster Wallace provocatively challenge the ethos of productivity by filtering their ethical interventions through culturally stigmatised imagery of laziness. Ladyga argues that when the motif of laziness appears, it invariably reveals the underpinnings of an emerging value system at a given historical moment, while at the same time offering a glimpse into the strategies of rebelling against the status quo.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Introduction: Doing Nothing in America -- Part I: The Philosophical and Literary Contexts of Laziness -- 1. Laziness as Concept-Metaphor -- 2. Laziness in American Literature: The Inaugural Moment -- Part II: The Modernist Moment of Laziness -- 3. Cessation and inaction externe: Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp -- 4. Laziness and Tactility in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden -- Part III: The Postmodern Moment of Laziness -- 5. Exhaustion of Possibilities: Harold Rosenberg, John Barth and Susan Sontag -- 6. Inertia and Not-Knowing in the Fiction of Donald Barthelme -- 7. Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King -- Epilogue -- Index