What is the most important thing England’s former colonies have in common? For Saikat Majumdar, an assistant professor at Stanford, the answer is boredom.
In his latest book, Prose of the World, Majumdar explores how writers from Ireland’s James Joyce to India’s Amit Chaudhuri spin the everyday dullness of marginalization into gleaming prose.
“Perhaps,” Majumdar said, “because literature’s traditional mission is to engage and excite the imagination, the inescapable reality of the banal and the boring has been overlooked in literary thought.” But, he added, “We need to take boredom a little more seriously.”
