What do we mean when we refer to “the everyday” in the novel? While the novel is the medium that has historically been tied to the philosophical investigation of the everyday, this panel rests on the premise that “the everyday” itself has become a taken-for-granted term in novel history and criticism, usually defined either by nineteenth-century literary realism’s “mimetic” rendering of everyday life, or by the defamiliarizing capacities of modernism, returning to the everyday its psychological, material strangeness. Rather than treat the everyday strictly as a discrete kind of generic content—scenes of domestic life; ordinary, unheroic characters—we also explore its function as a decidedly more variable form of sociality in the history of the novel. By analyzing transatlantic novels from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, we hope to construct one possible alternative literary history of the everyday from what Henri Lefebvre famously described as its “beginning” in the nineteenth century to our contemporary moment.

We ground our panel in philosophical accounts of the everyday by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, for whom the everyday invited discomfiting social encounters with moral perfectionism; as well as work by Lefebvre and Maurice Blanchot, who saw in the everyday the possibility of a utopian social world. These thinkers have been of interest to recent studies of the everyday in literature, including Nancy Yousef’s The Aesthetic Commonplace: Wordsworth, Eliot, Wittgenstein, and the Language of Every Day (2022), William Galperin’s The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday (2017), and Michael Sayeau’s Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative (2013). In building on these scholars’ work, we will cultivate a more nuanced critical awareness of “the everyday” in the novel beyond generic conventions—and, too, of its subsequent moral, social, and political ends.

Our panel contains three fifteen-minute papers, allowing for a full fifteen minutes of discussion. It will proceed chronologically, beginning with Molly Young’s paper on the confessional valences of the everyday in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872). Comparing Cavell’s concept of everyday acknowledgment to Eliot’s rendering of Hegelian recognition in the novel, Molly argues that for Eliot, the everyday is, most pressingly, a site of confessional social encounter, whereby one must acknowledge and confess their ordinary finitude in the presence of another. Eliot renders this potential most effectively not between one character and another, but between narrator, character, and reader. But Eliot’s particular form of everyday confession, in a rapidly secularizing society, is also a scene of potential cruelty and failure, whereby the misinterpretation of power dynamics can lead to burdensome and bruising exposure rather than moral improvement.

Aidan Watson-Morris will then analyze the twentieth-century implications of “the everyday” in the lesser-known Irish novelist B. Bergson Spiro’s 1933 novel The Mere Living, which theorizes it through the patterns, textures, and rhythms of social reproduction. Set over a single uneventful day in the life of a middle-class English family, the novel aims to depict what Maurice Blanchot famously described as the “residual life” of everyday activity. This "mere" residual life offers a metonym for grasping a historical moment in which daily life and structural totality appeared separate and together at once. The conspicuously Bergsonian register of Spiro’s novel ultimately discloses the proximity of stream-of-consciousness form to social critique. Borrowing from recent work by Nancy Fraser and Jacques Rancière, Aidan argues that the aesthetic dimension of the everyday remains vital for critique, and that critical theory remains equally vital for capturing the elusive social contours of everyday life.

Finally, Rivky Mondal will examine how characters’ attunement to the everyday, microsocial inequities of the twenty-first century in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017) and Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020) is accompanied by a lack of interest to instrumentalize these readings. Rooney and Leilani refrain from treating mundane issues of sex, survival, and satisfaction solely as small versions of big problems of racism, sexism, and other -isms. Instead, their novels foreground both scales—the phenomenological and the structural—and, toggling between them, reveal points of mismatch. In reading their apparent apathy to a politics which is deterritorialized from encounter, Rivky asks what we might learn from characters who defect on making minor problems major, and whose hyper-readings of the everyday do not make a difference about difference, but rather serve alternative functions that are protective and anticipatory.

Taken together, these papers will offer a more expansive understanding of “the everyday” in the novel, one newly attentive to the moral and political implications of its social form.