The Work of Laziness in American Literature - Zuzanna Ładyga

Publikacja dofinansowana przez Instytut Anglistyki Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego

Zuzanna Ładyga’s The Work of Laziness in American Literature is a uniquely insightful, erudite and intellectually subtle study of the ethical and aesthetic corollaries to the literary accounts of laziness and unproductivity in the history of the Western civilization and American literature and culture. Ładyga argues that the portrayals of laziness inevitably expose what Jacque Rancière has called “the distribution of the sensible” characteristic of a given epoch in the history of literature. Whenever the motif of laziness appears in a literary text, it reveals the axiological underpinnings of that epoch’s value system while, at the same time, offering a glimpse into the possible strategies of rebelling against the status quo. The Western thought, Ładyga notes, lacks conceptual means to think of “withdrawal from taking action” outside of the morally stigmatizing categories of right or wrong.

dr hab. Zofia Kolbuszewska

Zuzanna Ładyga is a literary critic and theorist. She is an assistant professor at the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw. She is the author of Rethinking Postmodern Subjectivity: Emmanuel Levinas and Ethics of Referentiality in the Work of Donald Barthelme (2009), editor of Barth, Barthelme, Coover (2015) and co-editor of Po Humanizmie: Od Technokrytyki do Animal Studies (2015) and a contributor to Approaches to American Cultural Studies (2016).