Journal X Volume 7 Number 2 Spring 2003 Article 7 2020 Tender is the Night: Thirteen Propositions on the Nature of Boredom Allan Hepburn McGill University Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jx Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Hepburn, Allan (2020) "Tender is the Night: Thirteen Propositions on the Nature of Boredom," Journal X: Vol. 7 : No. 2 , Article 7. Available at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jx/vol7/iss2/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal X by an authorized editor of eGrove. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Hepburn: Tender is the Night: Thirteen Propositions on the Nature of Bored Tender is the Night: Thirteen Propositions on the Nature of Boredom Allan Hepburn Allan Hepburn, F. Scott Fitzgerald treats boredom as a tactic of Assistant Professor seduction, resistance, wish, and aggression in of English at McGill Tender is the Night. Always prone to speculate on University, has pub the tedium vitae of the wealthy and the famous in lished essays on his novels, Fitzgerald fumed when readers twentieth-century referred to his characters as trivial.1 Boredom, I literature, opera, piano music, and believe, varies from epoch to epoch in its signif cultural studies;. icance and origins. It is contingent on such fac His forthcoming tors as class, war, education, urbanity, etiquette, book surveys narra nationality, and age. Triviality is, however, one tives of espionage in way that boredom declares itself. Dick and fiction and film.