In the last twenty years the concept of the quotidien, or the
everyday, has been prominent in contemporary French culture and in
British and American cultural studies. This book provides the first
comprehensive analytical survey of the whole field of approaches to
the everyday. It offers, firstly, a historical perspective,
demonstrating the importance of mainstream and dissident
Surrealism; the indispensable contribution, over a 20-year period
(1960-80), of four major figures: Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes,
Michel de Certeau, and Georges Perec; and the recent proliferation
of works that investigate everyday experience. Secondly, it
establishes the framework of philosophical ideas on which
discourses on the everyday depend, but which they
characteristically subvert. Thirdly, it comprises searching
analyses of works in a variety of genres, including fiction, the
essay, poetry, theatre, film, photography, and the visual arts,
consistently stressing how explorations of the everyday tend to
question and combine genres in richly creative ways. By
demonstrating the enduring contribution of Perec and others, and
exploring the Surrealist inheritance, the book proposes a genealogy
for the remarkable upsurge of interest in the everyday since the
1980s. A second main objective is to raise questions about the
dimension of experience addressed by artists and thinkers when they
invoke the quotidien or related concepts. Does the 'everyday' refer
to an objective content defined by particular activities, or is it
best thought of in terms of rhythm, repetition, festivity,
ordinariness, the generic, the obvious, the given? Are there events
or acts that are uniquely 'everyday', or is the quotidien a way of
thinking about events and acts in the 'here and now' as opposed to
the longer term? What techniques or genres are best suited to
conveying the nature of everyday life? The book explores these
questions in a comparative spirit, drawing new parallels between
the work of numerous writers and artists, including Andre Breton,
Raymond Queneau, Walter Benjamin, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot,
Michel Foucault, Stanley Cavell, Annie Ernaux, Jacques Reda, and
Sophie Calle.
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