My new article, “Lapse of Happily: Consuming Everyday Banality in American Experimental Poetry”, has been published. This is an article about shopping malls and television, and the way they provide us with “some freedom but only within established limits” (p. 113), with a number of choices to make but an ultimately limited number of options. I focus on Robert Fitterman’s Sprawl (2010) and Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) and their engagement with malls and television, respectively.
I discuss, for example, how “in Sprawl as in everyday life, ethical decisions about which shoes to buy are commensurate with decisions about what to pick from one’s wardrobe” (p. 115). In Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, “[t]he idea of wanting to call the suicide hotline may seem to be an unexpected event to occur in the middle of the everyday, but it is nevertheless ordinary, something that might happen” (p. 114).
This is a book chapter that appears in the edited collection Thinking with the Familiar in Contemporary Culture ‘Out of the Ordinary’ (editors Joel Kuortti, Kaisa Ilmonen, and Elina Valovirta and Janne Korkka, published by Brill). As the editors write, “The book flips the logic of exoticism around and scrutinizes the ordinary as the extraordinary, the mundane as exceptional, and the domestic as foreign, encountering the world around us in a new light.” (p. 9).
A fun anecdote: In 2012, a while before I first read Sprawl, I was visiting a friend in Ohio and we ended up going to Indian Mound Mall in Heath, OH. Indian Mound Mall is also the name of a section in Sprawl, and the book makes reference to the mounds, which are prehistoric sites built by ancient Native Americans, one of which we also visited at the time. Obviously Fitterman’s Indian Mound Mall is ultimately fictional, but my visit to the historic site and then to the mall (it was a Sunday and there was not much going on there; even the Church in the Mall was closed) feels special, an ordinary occasion made extraordinary by my engagement with a book of poetry in this article. 
You can order the book here (or recommend it to your university library).
The book was produced in the research project Out of the Ordinary, which was funded by the Academy of Finland. I was not an official or an original member of the project, but I worked in it for a while in 2014-2015. I wrote the first draft of the article back then and I am happy to finally see it published!
Citations from Kuortti, Joel, Kaisa Ilmonen, Elina Valovirta and Janne Korkka (eds). 2019. Thinking with the Familiar in Contemporary Literature and Culture “Out of the Ordinary.” Leiden: Brill.