Critiquing "La Vie Quotidienne": Contemporary Approaches to the Everyday

Abstract

In 2002, the cultural scholar Ben Highmore observed, are witnessing something of an academic boom in every day and he was right.1 The concept of _has indeed emerged as an important organizing principle and theoretical problem in literary and cultural studies, popular culture and media studies, sociology, and across the humanities in general. Recent years have seen the publication of Michael Gardiner's Critiques of Everyday Life (2000) and Highmore's own Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (2002), two excellent overviews of the major theories of everyday life. In 2002, New Literary History devoted a special issue to everyday life, while at the same moment, a special issue of Cultural Critique (Fall 2002) had pre cisely the same focus. When an area of inquiry gets its own Reader you know it has truly arrived, so perhaps the most prominent sign that a field we might think of as life studies is beginning to be consolidated is Routledge's 2002 publi cation of The Everyday Life Reader. Edited by Highmore, this inter disciplinary anthology consists of important theoretical texts on everyday life by a wide variety of thinkers. Scholars devoted more