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The essay situates the phenomenon of boredom within the analysis of modernity and emphasises the strict interconnectedness of the two terms. Through a genealogical approach, it analyses the etymologies and the history of a number of terms related to modern boredom: acedia, melancholy, ennui, spleen, Langeweile, and finally the English boredom. If these terms are all related, the analysis shows that modern boredom is a recent and different phenomenon, as is demonstrated by the fact that the English term "boredom" dates only from the seventeenth century. Some of the causes of the "invention" of boredom are then briefly singled out in order to situate historically the crisis of the self and of human experience which are at the core of the modern epidemic of boredom. Finally, the essay explores the recent literature on the subject and summarises the contributions included in the collection.
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C'est l'ennui! - l'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,
Il rêve d'échafauds enfumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
Hypocrite lecteur, - mon semblable, - mon frère!
[It is Ennui! - his eye swollen with unintentional tears,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.
You know him reader, that delicate monster,
Hypocrite reader, - my fellow, - my brother!]
Baudelaire, "Au Lecteur,i
1.
Baudelaire's prefatory poem to Les Fleurs du mal, "Au Lecteur," introduces the reader to a world of vice, error and sin, establishing the traits of that modernity which his merciless gaze will explore in the book. The counterpart of progress and modernisation - the idols of the nineteenth century - "La sottise, l'erreur, le péché, la lésine" [folly, error, sin, avarice] and "le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie" [rape, poison, daggers, arson] characterise a modernity which coincides with moral exhaustion, decadence and evil.1 Baudelaire addresses a fellow connoisseur of this modern decay and summons the reader to a commonality of sin through the insistence on the pronoun "nous" (we) and the adjective "nos/notre" (our). The rhetorical game he plays with pronouns identifies the author and the narrator with the reader by including the formers into the crowd of modern sinners, but simultaneously establishes the distance of reflection from this identification, melding sympathy and contempt, irony and...