America Everyday. This course will consider texts of American culture from the perspective of recent (and not-so recent) theories of the everyday. The purpose of the course is, first of all, to provide some overview to the range of approaches to everyday life. While the term “everyday life” might seem self-evident, its significance can best be summed in Blanchot’s phrase, “the everyday escapes.” The seemingly ungraspable experience of everydayness has come to stand in for those aspects of modernity by which we organize our daily practices of production and consumption. We shop, go to work, make dinner, go to a movie, all as if in some form of ether. Yet, the everyday conceptually organizes our world in its accepted and repetitive forms: the separation of production from consumption, the division of modern life into work and leisure, and the emergence of panoptical surveillance as the prevailing form of power. This particular course will explore the concept of the everyday by considering the places, practices, and objects that comprise the experience of everydayness . Among the issues we will consider are Bourdieu’s theory of practice as instantiated in his concept of the habitus, Bill Brown’s “thing theory,” Susan Willis’s discussion of exchange and use value, and Michel de Certeau’s influential work, The Practice of Everyday Life. This course will be transhistorical, which means we’ll be moving back and forth between the 19th and 20 centuries (and into our own) in order to investigate the evolution of the concept of everyday. It will also include a range of literary texts that will serve not only as illustrations of “theory,” but which produce their own theories within specific historical contexts.