Fall 2026
Prereq: none
Units: 2-0-4 Can be repeated for credit
(Second half of semester) The “small wonders” of this class are the routine practices of everyday life – activities like sleeping, eating, straightening up, commuting, and so on – and a range of similarly habitual feelings – of distraction, boredom, vigilance, apathy, relaxation, etc. These elements of everyday life are so commonplace as often to escape conscious observation, which is one reason why so many philosophers, sociologists, and cultural critics have made a deliberate attempt to understand them. In addition to reading some theoretical accounts of everyday life, we will watch the work of filmmakers (such as Chantal Akerman, Wim Wenders, Frederick Wiseman, and RaMell Ross) who display the tedium, dignity, and beauty of the quotidian. And we will read authors (Virginia Woolf, James Schuyler, Georges Perec, and others) who record habitual daily impressions with luminous precision. Students will produce, in writing or other media, a representation of select aspects of their own everyday life experience.