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The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse. Siobhan Phillips. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Pp. 336. $45.00 (cloth).
Modernism, Daily Time, and Everyday Life. Bryony Randall. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 232. $89.00 (cloth); $39.99 (paper).
Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present. Michael Sheringham. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 448. $125.00 (cloth); $55.00 (paper).
Philosophizing the Everyday. John Roberts. London and New York: Pluto Press, 2006. Pp. 160. $89.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper).
The Everyday Life Reader. Ben Highmore, ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. 392. $140.00 (cloth); $45.95 (paper).
Everyday Life and Cultural Theory. Ben Highmore. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. 208. $120.00 (cloth); $37.95 (paper).
Critiques of Everyday Life. Michael Gardiner. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. 256. $192.00 (cloth); $49.95 (paper).
With the emergence of several new books, special journal issues, and even a "Reader," the field of everyday life studies can now be said to have its own canon. The insistent paradox of everyday life continues to infuse new studies with energy and organization. The paradox can be put this way: to say this is ordinary is to give significance to what is insignificant. How do we discuss the ordinary when by its very nature it should remain overlooked? Scholars generally pursue this question either by prioritizing the philosophies of everyday life or by examining literary and cultural representations of the everyday. In this respect, the books listed above (and many more) fall into two categories: studies that explore, extend, and critique the foundational work of the Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre (Gardiner, Highmore, Roberts, Sheringham); and studies primarily interested in examining the texts of literary modernism (Phillips, Randall). Both approaches work to solve the paradox of the ordinary by maintaining a theoretical distance from actual practices or by exploring how we experience the everyday rather than the everyday's specific manifestations.
The literature of modernism preceded the theories of everyday life and helped to produce them. As Michael Sheringham illuminates in his exceptional and comprehensive study, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present, Lefebvre's theoretical model and those influenced by it grew out of debates regarding la vie...