Oxford University Press Against the Event: The Everyday and Evolution of Modernist Narrative

Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative investigates how a modernity famed for temporal acceleration - from Benjamin's 'shock' and 'distraction' to the postmodern loss of historical consciousness diagnosed by Jameson - generated fictions defined, strangely enough, not just by the 'new' but just as forcefully by everyday depletions of stasis and repetition, a flood of sameness in modern life. With close attention to the novels of Flaubert, Wells, Conrad, and Joyce, Against the Event relates this aspect of modernity to modernist and proto-modernist problems of narrative form, in particular the banalizing effects of genre, the threatening necessity of closure, and the obsolescence of the coherent narrator. In doing so, Against the Event is also an intervention into one of the pressing philosophical and theoretical issues of our time, that of the nature of the 'event.' Review This intriguing, persuasive book raises the critical stakes for thinking about the everyday, going beyond, for instance, Liesl Olson's Modernism and the Ordinary; it offers new insight into the development of modernist narrative, amply demonstrating modernist repurposing of plot even as it made new forms. ― J. M. Utell, Choice About the Author Michael Sayeau is Lecturer of English at University College London.