The Art of Idleness in Modern Literature

Abstract

This dissertation argues that literature, from the late nineteenth century forward, takes on an important but often unnoticed cultural role: as a counter-voice against the pressures of work. In this period, we can observe, in a wide range of authors, a sharpening interest in idleness as a zone of experience that invites aesthetic pleasure and that can serve as a holdout against the disfiguring pressures of the capitalist economy. The writers featured in this dissertation ascribe a new importance to states of passivity, repose, daydream, and other forms of nonproductive absorption, suggesting that it is here, outside the bounds of work, where imagination and contemplation can survive in the modern world. In many of the literary works I consider—from Émile Zola’s novels of naturalism to the modernism of Bloomsbury and the Harlem Renaissance to the homoerotic aestheticism of Alan Hollinghurst—a decadent embrace of idleness and beauty supports a political critique of the centrality of work. These texts imagine how leisure can be more democratically distributed across the population.

The case studies I have assembled illustrate a range of hopes, or fantasies, about the possibilities of leisure. Idleness is imagined as a luxurious escape from the miseries of labor (Zola and other naturalist writers), as a pacifistic immersion in the pleasures of conversation and art, allowing for aesthetic, erotic, and economic experimentalism (the Bloomsbury Group), as a prerequisite for the freedom of movement and political participation long denied to black Americans (Vincent O. Carter, William Gardner Smith, and other black flaneur narratives), and as an arena of total aesthetic and erotic surrender (Hollinghurst). In each case, idleness and aesthetic experience are represented as mutually augmenting. And in each case, idleness is revealed to have reformist tendencies, expressing a yearning for an enlarged field of experience, and linked explicitly, in several of the works I examine, to projects of political change.

This dissertation traces an alliance between literature and idleness, arguing that the intensification and remaking of leisure is a key part of literature’s cultural work.