On Academic Boredom

Abstract

The kind of boredom experienced in academia is unique. Neither a purely subjective nor objective phenomenon, it is the product of the way research is organized into papers, seminars, and conferences, as well as of a deep implicit metaphor that academic argument is a form of warfare. In this respect, the concepts of boredom and rigour are closely linked, since there is a kind of rigour in the Humanities that stresses the war metaphor, and structures scholarship defensively. This is opposed to a different kind of rigour that eschews the war metaphor altogether, and considers rigorousness in the light of a work's usefulness to its audience.