Lost and Found: Expatriate Writers in Paris

Catalog description

This course explores the connections between major French and American expatriate writings of the Modernist period and beyond. As the site of unprecedented cosmopolitanism and creativity, early 20th-century Paris saw the emergence of artistic and intellectual movements that were to have a considerable impact on Western culture to this day. Though a variety of texts (novels, short stories, memoirs, poems, and essays) we explore the questions of inner and outer exile inherent in the modern condition, of living and writing on the margins, of otherness and estrangement in relation to class, gender, sexuality, language, and to Paris as a specific urban environment. Includes texts by, among others, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Colette, Apollinaire, Proust, Aragon, Céline and Camus.