The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature
Zuzanna Ladyga
Abstract
The 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 e ... More
The 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
Keywords:
Laziness,
Ethics,
American modernism,
American postmodernism,
Michel Foucault,
Roland Barthes,
Giorgio Agamben,
Ernest Hemingway,
Donald Barthelme,
David Foster Wallace
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781474442923 |
| Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: May 2021 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474442923.001.0001 |
