C792: This advanced graduate seminar is about everyday life as both problem and possibility for cultural politics. On the one hand, the humdrum routines associated with everyday life—waking, bathing, working, eating, consuming, playing, and resting every single day—can threaten to stifle creative forms of human expression and foster complacency. On the other hand, as Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and others affirm, these very same routines also can be resources from which innovation might flow, to the extent that they present opportunities for doing the same thing all over again . . . but differently. This course will address this tension through four principal questions: what is everyday life? how does everyday life enable and constrain political action? in what ways has cultural studies engaged everyday life? and how might it continue to do so in ways that resist the field’s becoming intellectually and politically unimaginative—its becoming, in the banal sense, everyday?

Roughly the first third of this seminar will be dedicated to exploring specific theories and practices of everyday life. Thereafter, we will investigate how the field of cultural studies can find itself subjected to everyday life’s deadening routines. We will focus on the problem of cultural studies’ institutionalization, particularly on the politics of the field’s having impacted University curricula and administrative structures over the last 30 years or so. We also will focus on cultural studies’ growing internationalization, a move which, paradoxically, seems both to reify and to challenge its dominant U.S. and British formations. Ultimately, our aim will be to think through the conditions necessary to reinvent the project of cultural studies for the 21st century—a more imaginative, effective, and globally relevant cultural studies which, with any luck, might help to reinvigorate everyday life as both theoretical category and domain of human practice.

Books: Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping; Tony Bennett, Culture: A Reformer’s Science; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. I; Michael Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life; Ben Highmore (ed.) The Everyday Life Reader; Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday; Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis; Meaghan Morris, Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture; and Bill Readings, The University in Ruins.

We also will read essays by Ien Ang, Tony Bennett, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Rita Felski, Nicholas Garnham, Lawrence Grossberg, Stuart Hall, Agnes Heller, Michèle Mattelart, Naoki Sakai, Gregory J. Seigworth, Ted Striphas, and Raymond Williams, among possible others.