The CUNY Graduate Center Twentieth Century Area Studies Group Speaker Series Spring 2012
Allison Pease
John Jay, CUNY
Boredom in/and Feminist Modernist Fiction
Boredom has no essential character; it functions as a stance toward, or a gauge of, not only what is valued and meaningful, but one’s access to that meaning and value at any given point in time. Boredom emerges in British modernist fiction as an important register of British women’s experiences as they become aware of their lack of agency. This talk will explore how modern understandings of boredom are involved in the notion of the individual as producer of his or her own meaning, why it is a relevant gauge of early twentieth-century feminism and feminist fiction, and why contemporary feminist criticism has avoided the category of boredom despite its obvious place in modernist literature.
February 24th at 4 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center, English Program Lounge, Room 4406
Allison Pease is the Chair of the English Department at John Jay, CUNY. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from New York University. She specializes in nineteenth and twentieth-century British literature and culture, gender and sexuality, and aesthetic theory. She is the author of Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and a forthcoming book, also from Cambridge UP, Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom. In addition, her work has appeared in a number of venues, including Modernism/Modernity, English Literature in Transition Victorian Poetry, Criticism, Journal of Gender Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde, Reading Wilde/Querying Spaces, The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. For seven years she served as an editor of the journal Victorian Literature and Culture.
