Prosaic Desires

Reviews / Votes

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.