Theories of Everyday America in the Nineteenth-Century. This course is intended to do a couple of (hopefully related) things. First, it will serve as an introduction to theories of the Everyday. (I hope the capitalization of the word gives it an appropriately allegorical aura.) While the term “everyday life” might seem self-evident, its significance can best be summed up in Maurice Blanchot’s phrase, “the everyday escapes.” The seemingly ungraspable experience of everydayness has come to stand in for those aspects of urban 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. The purpose of this course is, first of all, to provide some overview to the range of theoretical approaches to everyday life. Second, the course will offer different ways to think about the Everyday within the specific parameters of (mostly) nineteenth-century American culture. There is indeed a history to the everyday in America, a history I hope to begin to explore by presenting several literary and cultural texts from the 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular, I want to start with the “day before everyday,” that is, those historical moments of founding and settling, in which we discover the invention of the everyday. Then I want to consider the post-bellum development of the Everyday as a new and important aspect of fiction. We will consider Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home in relation to Thoreau’s Walden, Louisa May Alcott’s Work in relation to Whitman’s poetry, Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes, and Frank Norris’s McTeague in relation to Abraham Cahan’s Yekl. Among the theorists we’ll read are Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Susan Willis, Bill Brown, and Arjun Appadurai.