Prosaic Desires - by Sara Crangle (Paperback)

About the Book

Exploring a variety of everyday human longings as they arise in modernist fiction, this book poses a direct challenge to psychoanalytic criticism that characterises desire as sexual or powerful in nature. Using continental philosophy as its framework, it contends that human longings are as endless in kind as they are in manifestation.

Book Synopsis

Exploring a variety of everyday human longings as they arise in modernist fiction, this book poses a direct challenge to psychoanalytic criticism that characterises desire as sexual or powerful in nature. Using continental philosophy as its framework, Prosaic Desires contends that human longings are as endless in kind as they are in manifestation. As philosophy moved into the twentieth century, there was a discernible shift in emphasis from individual wilfulness to the role of the other in desire. In examining this historical trajectory, Prosaic Desires considers Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but relies primarily on the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, who radically inverts the traditional philosophical pursuit of subjective autonomy by arguing that the self is defined by endless longing for the other. In an extension of Levinasian theory, Prosaic Desires claims that desire-driven shifts from self to other can be located in modernist literature. The banal longings examined here lie within the poles of sexuality and power, and include desires to know and escape boredom, as well as risibility and anticipation. Authors studied include Joyce, Woolf, Stein, and Beckett, all of whom evince a discernible movement away from self-absorbed, grand narratives of desire toward other-based, evanescent longings throughout their careers. Central to their modernist writings - and in turn, to Prosaic Desires - is the conflicted relationship between daily, finite experience and the limitlessness of human desire.

From the Back Cover

ENDORSEMENTS BEING SOUGHT Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation Sara Crangle Exploring a variety of everyday human longings as they arise in modernist fiction, this book poses a direct challenge to psychoanalytic criticism that characterises desire as sexual or powerful in nature. Using continental philosophy as its framework, Prosaic Desires contends that human longings are as endless in kind as they are in manifestation. As philosophy moved into the twentieth century, there was a discernible shift in emphasis from individual wilfulness to the role of the other in desire. In examining this historical trajectory, Prosaic Desires considers Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but relies primarily on the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, who radically inverts the traditional philosophical pursuit of subjective autonomy by arguing that the self is defined by endless longing for the other. In an extension of Levinasian theory, Prosaic Desires claims that desire-driven shifts from self to other can be located in modernist literature. The banal longings examined here lie within the poles of sexuality and power, and include desires to know and escape boredom, as well as risibility and anticipation. Authors studied include Joyce, Woolf, Stein, and Beckett, all of whom evince a discernible movement away from self-absorbed, grand narratives of desire toward other-based, evanescent longings throughout their careers. Central to their modernist writings-and in turn, to Prosaic Desires-is the conflicted relationship between daily, finite experience and the limitlessness of human desire. Sara Crangle is a lecturer at the University of Sussex and a former research fellow at Queens' College, Cambridge.

Review Quotes

Rather than allowing modernism to stand as a descriptive term (a certain time period, a certain geographical area), Crangle ties it to a specific affective experience, and thereby demands that the term retain its evaluative component. This is a move that calls into question not only the way we think of desire, or the way we read Joyce, Woolf, Stein, or Beckett, but also the ways that we make use of literary categories.

--Laura Finch, University of Pennsylvania "Journal of Modern Literature "

A fascinating study--Rachel Murray "James Joyce Broadsheet, No 97 "

In this penetrating new study, Sara Crangle argues persuasively that the crisis-driven aesthetics of literary modernism persistently grounded its unfulfilled longings in the "small urgent feelings of the everyday". Boredom, laughter, anxious anticipation - these constitute the surprisingly "prosaic" emotional register that governed the modernists' radical experiments with literary form.--Peter Nicholls, Professor of English, New York University

Sara Crangle's inventive book shifts our attention from great desires to the little desires of everyday life, such as the desire to laugh, to be relieved of boredom or to be freed of desire altogether. It is these low-key, "prosaic desires," Crangle argues, that galvanize the modernist imagination. Making ingenious use of Levinas's ethical thought, Crangle combines theoretical insight with sinuous close reading in this scintillating contribution to modernist studies.--Maud Ellmann, Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English, University of Chicago

About the Author

Sara Crangle is Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Sussex