Boredom

In conventional usage, boredom is an emotional or psychological state experienced when an individual is left without anything in particular to do, is not interested in his or her surroundings, or feels that a day or period is dull or tedious. It is also understood by scholars as a modern phenomenon which has a cultural dimension. In Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Elizabeth Goodstein traces the modern discourse on boredom through literary, philosophical, and sociological texts to find that as "a discursively articulated phenomenon...boredom is at once objective and subjective, emotion and intellectualization — not just a response to the modern world but also a historically constituted strategy for coping with its discontents." In both conceptions, boredom has to do fundamentally with an experience of time and problems of meaning.

Etymology and terminology

The first recorded use of the word boredom is in the novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens, written in 1852, in which it appears six times, although the expression to be a bore had been used in print in the sense of "to be tiresome or dull" since 1768. The expression "boredom" means "state of being bored," 1852, from bore (v.1) + -dom. It also has been employed in a sense "bores as a class" (1883) and "practice of being a bore" (1864, a sense properly belonging to boreism, 1833)". The word "bore" as a noun meaning a "thing which causes ennui or annoyance" is attested to since 1778; "of persons by 1812". The noun "bore" comes from the verb "bore", which had the meaning "[s]ense of "[to] be tiresome or dull" first attested [in] 1768, a vogue word c. 1780-81 according to Grose (1785); possibly a figurative extension of "to move forward slowly and persistently," as a [hole-] boring tool does." The French term for boredom, ennui, is sometimes used in English as well.

Cities Built on Sand

Cities Built on Sand is the first released EP by American post-hardcore group, VersaEmerge. It was independently released in 2007. This EP featured their previous vocalist Spencer Pearson.

Track list

Ennui (sonnet)

"Ennui" is a sonnet by Sylvia Plath published for the first time in November 2006 in the online literary journal Blackbird . Sylvia Plath wrote the Petrarchan sonnet “Ennui” during her undergraduate years at Smith College.

International reaction

The first appearance of “Ennui” in print received international attention, from New York to New Delhi. Reports on the poem were featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian Unlimited, The International Herald Tribune, and other journals.

References

External links