A review by cjazzlee
The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau

4.0

I echo some of the previous readers' comments about the density and difficulty of De Certeau's sentences - I had to look up words in the dictionary 3 times in one sentence at some point, and this was at the graduate school level. However, I also love love his metaphor of walking in the city as a way of affirming individual ways of doing life, of seeing, of choosing, of practicing everyday life, in contrast to mainstream ways that society is constructed, as expressed in the metaphor by the set routes and paths laid out for us in a typical city grid. There are so many ways this idea applies to discourses of power, identity, memory and a myriad of other areas we look at in life and were challenged to look at in grad school. I want to take another stab at the way he approached Derrida - difficult but I think it will be worth mining for ideas.