English 391 - Lit of Everyday Life

This class focuses on how writers give narrative shape and poetic expression to a single day, ordinary moments, and the rhythms of quotidian life. Even the seemingly mundane can reveal powerful historical, political, and cultural realities. It is also about how theorists make sense of the everyday as an object of analysis or a site for social commentary. What happens to our expectations about plot, event, character development, linear progression, climax, or closure when a novel is set on one single day? We will focus on fiction that tries to capture the mundane and ordinary, the patterns, moods, rhythms, and textures of daily life. And we will consider how sometimes the ordinary in fact becomes extraordinary. We will also look at how large social and political questions impinge on life’s daily rhythms. Here are some of the guiding principles and major questions we’ll engage:

- The very category of the “everyday” is a big problem

- The everyday as intersection between the personal and the political, the public and the private, the present moment and history

-The challenge of noticing the everyday has a lot in common with the challenge of close reading

- The relationship between the everyday and the literary goes in both directions

The class will focus on substantive close reading and writing; students will also be encouraged to keep a journal of their own everyday lives. Primary readings will include The Book of Delights by Ross Gay; A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood; Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine; Ordinary Affects by Kathleen Stewart; and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Examples of critical theorists include Michel de Certeau; Rita Felski; Henry James; Victor Shklovsky; and others.

Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Abramson.