• Home
• About
• Login
• Register
• Search

antae is an innovative and critical postgraduate journal exploring current issues and debates within literary studies, theory and criticism.

This journal is particularly interested in submissions situated across interdisciplinary spaces provided by diverse forms and expression within narrative, poetry, theatre, literary theory, cultural criticism, media studies, digital cultures, philosophy, psychology and language studies.

antae also accepts creative writing.

Click 'View Journal' below to access antae issues.

** NEWS **

‘There’s little left but to be bored or bore.’
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIV

‘Mieux vaut un désastre qu'un désêtre.’
Alain Badiou, Conditions

 ‘Despair yawns.’
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

‘There seemed nothing to do but live.’
J. M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K

In ‘Myxomatosis’, Philip Larkin describes lethargy in terms of ‘hot inexplicable hours [that] go by’ while we ‘keep quite still and wait’ for ‘things [to] come right again’. Indeed, this tedium of idleness, this waiting for Godot, is something with which we are all too familiar, and yet the innumerable perspectives on this inactivity attest that, perhaps, boredom can be ineffably and ineluctably compelling.

Patrick Coleman says that ‘Rousseau speaks of boredom because a boring text is a harmless one. If we do not make the effort to go beyond the first reading, we will not suffer any consequences worse than ennui.’ What is it, then, to read and write about boredom itself? Is boredom as innocuous as Coleman suggests? And beyond textual boredom, what role does boredom play in the dichotomy of cause and effect, affliction and symptom? Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekov or Søren Kierkegaard consider indifference and boredom to be the greatest perpetuators of evil, but can boredom ever be made to function as deliverance, rather than pathology? Stendhal observes how the ‘boredom of married life inevitably destroys love’, but in stark contrast T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock happily seems to ‘have measured out [his] life in coffee spoons’ rather than heed, with any great interest, ‘the mermaids singing, each to each’.

In fact, although boredom all too often carries negative connotations, Prufrock’s pathetic boredom might carry parallels with Martin Heidegger’s contention that the break from distraction afforded by boredom allows us to reflect and live authentically in the sense of Gelussenheit; it is profound boredom which ‘reveals being as a whole’. Despite this, there remains the familiar and continuous struggle to return oneself to action through any means available—one may here think of, for example, Edgar Degas’s L’Absinthe.

The editors of antae welcome submissions on or around the topic of boredom. The authorial guidelines are available on www.antaejournal.com, and the deadline for submissions to antaejournal@gmail.com is the 30^th June, 2015. Other issues and topics relevant to this special edition include, but are not limited to:

• Boredom, Sublimation, and the Sublime
• The (an)Aesthetics of Boredom
• Boredom, Consumerism, and Over-Stimulation
• Digital Boredom and Game Culture
• Boredom and Love
• Boredom, Apathea, and the Crisis of Meaning
• Desire, or the lack of
• The Language of Boredom
• Depression and Melancholia
• Beneficial Boredom
• Boredom Now / The Time of Boredom
• Boredom, Violence, and the Problems of Evil
• The (non-)Ethics of Boredom
• Boredom and Drugs

antae

A Postgraduate Journal on English Studies and its Interfaces

View Journal | Current Issue | Register