The Critique of Everyday Life ENG 446
Everyday life is mundane, repetitive, and boring. Yet ‘the everyday’ is absolutely fascinating to the genre of the novel, and is considered incredibly complex by important philosophies of socio-political relations like feminism and Marxism. This course explores theories of everyday life, of social space and architecture, of power relations and the reproduction of society, and asks about the tensions between the quotidian and the spectacular, the banal and the exceptional, as they organize experience and inspire the novel.
Everyday Life Writing Experiment #1:
This course focuses on the dynamics of everyday life and the conventions for representing everyday life in literature. Throughout the semester, we will engage in a number of experiments in everyday life writing. For the first experiment, due Tuesday 27 August in class, please complete a short work (500 words or less) about your everyday life. The form of this “work” is up to you (narration? description? dialogue? catalogue? verse? tweets?), so take license and liberty. The perspective is also up to you (your everyday life as it appears to you; the everyday life of a stranger as it appears to you; your everyday life as it might appear to a stranger). No research or theory is necessary for this assignment, and there is no right way to do it – try to have fun!
Below are some options to get you going, though you need not consider them.
- things you do every single day
- typical or familiar experiences, interactions, sights, sounds, places, or events in your life
- your schedule; deviations from your schedule
- eating sleeping eliminating dressing walking talking working reading facebooking
- best / worst / prevailing feeling of the day
- best / worst moment of the day
Schedule of Readings
EVERYDAYNESS
Tues 27 Aug
Introductions; your everyday
Everyday Life Writing Experiment due
Thurs 29 Aug
Rita Felski, “The Invention of Everyday Life”
Raymond Williams, “Ordinary, Culture is Ordinary”
Tues 3 Sep
Activity from 101 Experiments in Philosophy of Everyday Life
Language 2, 44, 49, 57, 77
Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech”
Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness”
PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION
Thurs 5 Sep
Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor”
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism excerpt
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep Chapter 2
Tues 10 September
Fredric Engels, Origins of the Family excerpt
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique excerpt
Pat Mainardi, “The Politics of Housework”
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble excerpt
Thurs 12 Sep
Thorston Veblen, “Conspicuous Consumption”
Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life excerpt
Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction excerpt
Tues 17 Sep
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish “Panopticism”
Foucault, History of Sexuality excerpt
Louis Althusser, “Ideological State Apparatuses”
REALISMS: WRITING THE EVERYDAY
Thurs 19 Sep
Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”
Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”
Franco Moretti, “Serious Century”
Susan Sontag, On Photography “Melancholy Objects”
Tues 24 Sep
Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine Chapters 1-5
Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”
Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail “Details and Realism”
Harry Shaw, Narrating Reality, “Realism and Things”
Thurs 26 Sep
Baker, The Mezzanine Chapters 6-9
Activity from 101 Experiments in Philosophy of Everyday Life
Attunement 40, 43, 51
Tues 1 Oct
Baker, The Mezzanine conclusion
Mike Featherstone, “The Aestheticization of Everyday Life”
SPACES OF THE EVERYDAY, PHYSICAL AND PSYCHIC
Thurs 3 Oct
Activity from 101 Experiments in Philosophy of Everyday Life
Public space 24, 37, 97
Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz
Walter Benjamin, “The Flaneur”
Upton Dell, “Architecture in Everyday Life”
Tues 8 Oct
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
Barthes, “Semiology and the Urban”
Fredric Jameson, “Is Space Political?”
Thurs 10 Oct
Michel De Certeau, “Walking in the City”; “Spatial Stories”
Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”
Karsten Harries, “Space, Place, and Ethos”
Tues 15 Oct
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 1-50
Williams, “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism”
Thurs 17 Oct
Mrs Dalloway 50-100
Tues 22 Oct
Mrs Dalloway 100-150
Le Corbusier, “The Great City”
Thurs 24 Oct
Mrs Dalloway 150-end
Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary excerpt
DEFAMILIARIZING THE EVERYDAY
Tues 29 Oct
Guy Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life”
Sigfried Kracauer, “Boredom”
Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”
Thurs 31 Oct
Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life excerpt
Eric Santner, The Psychotheology of Everyday Life excerpt
Tues 5 Nov
Renata Salecl, On Anxiety excerpt
Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have excerpt
Thurs 7 Nov
Rob Horning, “Facebook in the Age of Facebook”; “Facebook as Experiment”;
“Affective Privacy and Surveillance”
Mark Poster, “Everyday Virtual Life”
Jodi Dean, Blog Theory excerpt
Tues 12 Nov
Jason Read, Marx and The Prehistory of Capital excerpt
Thurs 14 Nov
Slavoj Zizek, “The Spectre of Ideology”
THE ETERNAL RETURN OF THE EVERYDAY
Tues 19 Nov
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections 1-100
Thurs 21 Nov
NO CLASS – LIBRARY HOUR FOR RESEARCH PAPERS
Tues 26 Nov
The Corrections 100-250
Claire Colebrook, “The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life”
Thurs 28 Nov THANKSGIVING
Tues 3 Dec
The Corrections 250-450
Thurs 5 Dec
The Corrections 450-end