Monotonous Feeling

Abstract

In "Everyday Speech" Maurice Blanchot eloquently articulates the long held and often rehearsed notion that the everyday eludes representation. Yet, in recent years, literary and cultural studies scholars have begun to explore the limitations of this conception. Monotonous Feeling contributes to this burgeoning conversation by examining three Modern and Contemporary novels that take the everyday's resistance to representation not at a cue for aesthetic transformation but for formal innovation. It argues that Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and Marilynne Robinson's Home, which each define the everyday as a mode of taken-for-granted or distracted attention, use formal techniques to make manifest the monotonous attentions of the everyday in order to make us feel what in the formal and affective limitations of our aesthetic approaches we cannot know. In arousing and making use of feelings that we so often regard as signals of a fractured meaning making process, these novels invite, even push, us to consider the value of everyday felt states that might structure our narratives.