Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation

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, 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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Mortal Self, Infinite Longings; 1. Dying To Know; 2. Haunted By Boredom; 3. Inclining Towards Laughter; 4. In The Meantime; Conclusion: Endlessnessnessness; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author :
Sara Crangle is Professor of Modernism and the Avant-Garde at the University of Sussex, where she researches and teaches literature and culture from 1850 onward, emphasising approaches experimental and decolonial.Her books include I’m Working Here: The Collected Poems of Anna Mendelssohn (Shearsman Books, 2020); On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music (with Peter Nicholls, Bloomsbury, 2012); Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (Dalkey Archive, 2011); and Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation (Edinburgh University Press, 2010).With the support of a 2023-24 Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, she is researching and editing Anna Mendelssohn’s roman à clef, What a Performance. Her critical edition of Mendelssohn’s poetry received award recognition from the Society for Textual Scholarship in 2021.

Review :
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 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. 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.