High Modernism, Lowly Desires: A Review of Sara Crangle's Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation

Sara Crangle’s Prosaic Desires draws attention to the banal, ephemeral, but nevertheless fundamental desires that propel modernist fiction. Using Levinas to write back to the Foucauldian tradition that links desire with the hegemonic structures of power, Crangle argues that modernism was more concerned with the minutiae of longing felt between self and other. Focusing on knowledge, boredom, laughter, and anticipation, Crangle draws a map of the theories of intersubjectivity available in the prose of modernist fiction. The book takes Joyce, Woolf, Stein, and Beckett as its key texts, and puts them into conversation with the philosophy of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Levinas.