Introduction. The paradox of the ordinary
The nineteenth century and the everyday
Ordinary life and modern war
James Joyce and the realism of the ordinary. Ibsen and epiphany
Virginia Woolf and the "cotton wool of daily life".
Gertrude Stein, William James, and habit in the shadow of war. Habit : "the enormous fly-wheel of society"
A "perfectly ordinary couple living an ordinary life"
Wallace Stevens's commonplace. The normal poet
"An ordinary evening in New Haven"
Conclusion. Beginnings and endings : Proust's temporality and the everyday.