The innovative imagination of several generous people shaped the conditions under which this book on banality came into its final shape. For its early life, I’m indebted to the English department at Rutgers University, especially my mentors there: Derek Attridge, Abena Busia, Marianne DeKoven, Marc Manganaro; and to Myra Jehlen, for insights into the rich paradoxes of the writing process. The neighboring English department at Princeton offered a great turf to toss back and forth risky ideas; my gratitude goes to Tim Watson, for tireless cheer over the years, and to Diana Fuss, for pushing me to take risky paths whose rewards have become clear to me far beyond the reaches of this particular project.
The book developed into its final shape through deep engagement by a number of colleagues at the English department at Stanford. I’m grateful to John Bender, Michele Elam, Andrea Lunsford, Franco Moretti, Paula Moya, Blakey Vermeule, and Alex Woloch for having read and commented on significant portions of the manuscript. Gavin Jones, Seth Lerer, and Ursula Heise were tireless supporters in its final journey as a book, and Sianne Ngai’s careful eyes helped me hone a few key passages at the final stages of the editing process. Ramón Saldívar and Jennifer Summit were generous and supportive department chairs as the book came to grow into present life. Some of the most attentive reading of the chapter drafts came from friends in the department with whom at various times I exchanged work in progress: Andrew Goldstone, Evan Horowitz, Hannah Sullivan, and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé. Ann Gelder, Nikil Saval, and James Wood provided valuable assistance with copy editing. Allison Rung’s meticulous help with bibliographic research, citations, and formatting greatly eased this book’s passage into its final form. Alyce Boster and Dagmar Logie have been the source of deeply generous administrative support throughout the process. Similar thanks go to Colleen Boucher, Judy Candell, Katie Dooling, Nelia Peralta, and Nicole Yun for responding promptly to every professional need well before I was able to articulate them fully. Beyond the department, special thanks go to Russell Berman, Elisabeth Boyi, Jim Ferguson, Josh Landy, David Palumbo-Liu, and Ban Wang for their interest in my project and their suggestions for its improvement; to Ximena Briceno and Héctor Hoyos for their friendly support of this work and its author; to Emily-Jane Cohen and Julie Noblitt for their thoughts on the best ways of wishing bon voyage to a book.
In the wider world of the discipline, this project was lucky to get support of several other scholars with whose work it envisions a dialogue. Thanks to Jed Esty, Doug Mao, John Marx, and Rebecca Walkowitz, for reading parts of the manuscript and sharing their thoughts, and to Sarah Brophy, John Bugg, Daniel Coleman, Nadia Ellis, Andrew Griffin, Mike Rubenstein, and Keri Walsh, for the miracle of long-standing friendship over shared passions. Excerpts from the project were presented at talks given at Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jadavpur University, and the Australian National University. To the audience at these talks I owe much provocation of thought; special thanks go to Gautam Premnath, Prasanta Chakravarty, Saugata Bhaduri, Supriya Chaudhuri, Debjani Ganguly, and Shameem Black for inviting me to present my work. Some of the early material appeared in journals: James Joyce Quarterly 42/43, nos. 1/4 (Fall 2004/ Summer 2006), Genre 39, no. 2 (Summer 2006), Studies in the Novel 39, no. 4 (Winter 2007), and Modern Fiction Studies 55, no. 1 (Spring 2009). I’m grateful to the editors for permission to reproduce the material here. Philip Leventhal at Columbia University Press deserves my gratitude for his unflagging faith in the potential of this project; thanks also to the anonymous readers at the press for their comments.
The publication of this book was partially supported by a grant from my home department at Stanford, and the manuscript was honed into its final shape during a year of sabbatical leave, a semester of which was spent at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study, at Jawaharlal Nehru University. My thanks to Jennifer Summit, then chair of the Stanford English department, for providing me with the subvention grant, and to Aditya Mukherjee, the director of JNIAS, for the generous fellowship that supported my stay at the institute.
The writing of any book must owe worlds to the banality as well as the excitement of labor rooted in the everyday, and for sharing this dailiness with me, my special gratitude goes to Subhasree Chakravarty. And just as this book was nearing completion, our daughter Inaya arrived to change our everyday forever; to her I owe a radically new meaning of the quotidian.