Boredom with high modern classics reveals our own postmodernity

Evidence

What is suspicious about the matter, and about the questions that it raises, is their overwhelming family likeness with familiar discussions of the nature of the classic itself, the “inexhaustible” text, capable of being reinvented and used in new ways by successive generations — something like a great manor house, handed down and redecorated over and over by successive heirs, who can install the latest Parisian fashions or Japanese technology. Meanwhile, the nonsurvivors are proof that “posterity” really does exist, even in our own postmodern media age; the losers are a crucial component of the argument, who document the necessary pastness of the past by showing that not all its “great books” are still of any interest to us. This approach conveniently masks out those parts of the problem that reidentify it with the older historicist dilemma and prevents us from learning something about our own postmodernity by way of the boredom inspired by the high modern “classics” we can no longer read. But boredom is a very useful instrument with which to explore the past, and to stage a meeting between it and the present. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 662

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: Boredom as an instrument for exploring the past could seed a fiction where a researcher treats her own boredom with canonical texts as primary evidence about her historical moment.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — the texts we cannot read teach us more about ourselves than the ones we can — is dense: boredom as a historical diagnostic, the losers of canon-making as the real evidence for periodization.