Snoozefest

Shakespeare may have invented the phrase “night owl,” but he respected good repose. In Macbeth, he described sleep as the “chief nourisher in life’s feast.” Paul Huebener would probably agree. With Restless in Sleep Country, the English professor at Athabasca University, in Alberta, advances a rigorous and wide-ranging take on snoozing, grouped under two categories. He grapples with the historical, ideological, and political baggage that conditions how we “imagine and encounter” our slumbers: a “critical literacy.” He also examines depictions of sleep in Canadian movies, novels, print ads, poetry, and TV commercials, among other media: a “cultural literacy.” What might appear at first blush persnickety and overthinking verbiage — the sort of academic bluster that inspires exasperated groans outside the ivory tower — offers much insight. This book isn’t just for scholars and specialists.

Key to Huebener’s project is the notion that sleep is not...