
The Literary Agenda Is A Series Of Short Polemical Monographs About The Importance Of Literature And Of Reading In The Wider World And About The State Of Literary Education Inside Schools And Universities. The Category Of 'the Literary' Has Always Been Contentious. What Is Clear, However, Is How Increasingly It Is Dismissed Or Is Unrecognised As A Way Of Thinking Or An Arena For Thought. It Is Sceptically Challenged From Within, For Example, By The Sometimes Rival Claims Of Cultural History, Contextualized Explanation, Or Media Studies. It Is Shaken From Without By Even Greater Pressures: By Economic Exigency And The Severe Social Attitudes That Can Follow From It; By Technological Change That May Leave The Traditional Forms Of Serious Human Communication Looking Merely Antiquated. For Just These Reasons This Is The Right Time For Renewal, To Start Reinvigorated Work Into The Meaning And Value Of Literary Reading. We Live In Days, No Leaving Them Or Choosing Them. What's In A Day? With Their Natural Narrative Arc They Begin And They End, And In Between We Talk About How They Are Going Or Wonder 'where' They Have Gone. They Each Have Their Small Stories, Non-stories, Ephemeral Stories. So Every Day Slips By, Most Days Much Like Most Other Days. We Eat, We Sleep, We Go To Work; We Endure, Enjoy, Continue. Day After Day, Day Before Day, It Is The Recurring Of No Particular Story In Endless, Beginningless Succession. At The Same Time, Any Single Day Is Also A Unique Date, With Its Multi-digit Identity, Its Moment-at Last, And Never Again-of Here And Now, Today. And On Longer Scales, The Slow Small Shifts Of Ordinary Days And Their Surrounding Stories Will Eventually Remake The Days That Have Been And Gone As The Times That Are No More. An Ordinary Day From Decades, Let Alone Centuries Ago Must Now Be A 'once' Long Passed Away, The Old Days To Be Regretted-or To Be Revived In All The Curiosity Of Their Historical Difference. Everyday Stories Makes Us Think Again About Th
This book investigates the significance of the ordinary day as a narrative structure and a site of historical and philosophical inquiry. Rachel Bowlby, a professor of comparative literature, utilizes her background in literary theory to examine how the mundane repetition of daily life functions as a form of storytelling. She argues that by analyzing the 'non-stories' of our daily routines, we can better understand the intersection of personal experience, historical time, and the value of literary reading in a modern context.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Experts recognize this work as a thoughtful contribution to the Literary Agenda series, noting its ability to bridge the gap between abstract theory and the lived experience of time. Readers frequently highlight the accessible yet intellectually rigorous nature of the prose, which encourages a re-evaluation of how we perceive our own daily existence.
Page Count:
192
Publication Date:
2016-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0191043478
ISBN-13:
9780191043475
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