Prosaic DesiresModernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation

Poses a direct challenge to psychoanalytic criticism that characterises desire as sexual or powerful in nature

• Examines key modernist writers—including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett—to trace a shift from self-focused desire to more relational, fleeting forms of longing
• Explores the tension between everyday life and human desire, showing how modernist literature negotiates the conflict between finite daily experience and limitless longing
• Offers a fresh perspective on modernism, revealing how changing conceptions of desire shape the evolution of twentieth-century literary writing

Using continental philosophy as its framework, Prosaic Desires contends that human longings are as endless in kind as they are in manifestation. As philosophy moved into the twentieth century, there was a discernible shift in emphasis from individual wilfulness to the role of the other in desire. In examining this historical trajectory, Prosaic Desires considers Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but relies primarily on the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, who radically inverts the traditional philosophical pursuit of subjective autonomy by arguing that the self is defined by endless longing for the other. In an extension of Levinasian theory, Prosaic Desires claims that desire-driven shifts from self to other can be located in modernist literature. The banal longings examined here lie within the poles of sexuality and power, and include desires to know and escape boredom, as well as risibility and anticipation.