The most extraordinary things are also the everyday.
—Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life
This presentation takes as its starting point Marjorie Perloff’s assertion, in the context of a discussion of Ludwig Wittgenstein, that poetry is not “the expression or externalization of inner feeling; it is, more accurately, the critique of that expression.” (Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 1996: 184) As such, poetry provides a vital occasion to examine, and reexamine, the language of our everyday life. By contrast, contemporary culture teems with uncritical daily expressions of the individual—perhaps best exemplified in the genre of the blog. For all the freedom that this amorphous genre allows, blogs dealing with the everyday can be surprisingly uniform
—Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life
This presentation takes as its starting point Marjorie Perloff’s assertion, in the context of a discussion of Ludwig Wittgenstein, that poetry is not “the expression or externalization of inner feeling; it is, more accurately, the critique of that expression.” (Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 1996: 184) As such, poetry provides a vital occasion to examine, and reexamine, the language of our everyday life. By contrast, contemporary culture teems with uncritical daily expressions of the individual—perhaps best exemplified in the genre of the blog. For all the freedom that this amorphous genre allows, blogs dealing with the everyday can be surprisingly uniform