This course will introduce you to the critical practices emerging from recent (and not-so recent) theories of the everyday. You might wonder, “Do we really need a theory of everyday life?“ While the term “everyday life” might seem self-evident, its significance can best be summed 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 the course is, first of all, to provide some overview to the range of theoretical approaches to everyday life. We will do so both by reading literary texts and by reflecting on our own everyday lives as the objects for theoretical inquiry. “Okay,“ you might ask, “but what do theories of the everyday have to do with my work as an English major? After all, this is meant to follow up the Introduction to the Major (Engl. 202) and to prepare me for other English Department courses.“ The second purpose of the course is to use our investigations to think about the functions of theory and the place of literature in an academic setting. We will think about what it means to “do theory” or to “use theory” and how theory itself is a feature of our everyday lives. It’s my hope that this course will be a bridge not only to other English courses but also, and more importantly, bridge your personal and your academic lives. Among the issues we will consider are Pierre Bourdieu’s and Michel de Certeau’s theories of practice, Bill Brown’s “thing theory,” Susan Willis’s discussion of exchange and use value. Among the literary works we will encounter are Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, Robert Irwin’s The Limits of Vision, Aimee Bender’s An Invisible Sign of My Own.