General Information
Course Description
9568 - Critiques of Everyday Life - The last couple of decades have witnessed a burgeoning interest in the phenomenon of "everyday life" within the social sciences and humanities, evinced by developments in cultural studies, geography, philosophy, politics, sociology and women's studies. This course will survey a relatively coherent "counter tradition" in twentieth-century social and cultural thought that has been largely ignored or marginalised by mainstream approaches within the human sciences. Such a counter tradition has sought not merely to describe lived experience, but to transform--that is, to elevate an understanding of the everyday to the status of a critical knowledge. As such, it offers a myriad of new possibilities for critical, social and cultural theorizing and empirical research in a multi-disciplinary fashion. The main emphasis of the course will be to look At the French approach to everyday life theorizing, stretching from the Surrealists to Henri Lefebvre, including the diverse writings of the Situationist International and Michel de Certeau, but will also encompass, for instance, Agnes Heller's important work on the relationship between the everyday, rationality and ethics; themes of carnival, "prosaics" and intersubjectivity in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin; and finally Dorothy E. Smith's development of a feminist perspective on everyday life.
