Paris: lire la ville, écrire la ville

Catalog description

Paris, the "City of Light" and "capital of the nineteenth century," exists as much as an imaginary space as a real one. How have urbanism, modernity, and war contributed to literary representations of France's capital city? How did 19th-century Hausmannization lead to the emergence of 20th-century Surrealist and Situationist practices? In what ways can studying the city through fictional perambulations allow for a "writing" and re-writing of urban space? In this seminar (taught entirely in French), students will engage in the practices of literary and cultural analysis through the theoretical prisms of thinkers like Barthes, De Certeau, Lefebvre, and Serres. Primary readings will include Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Emile Zola's Au Bonheur des dames (1863), Charles Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris (1831), Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris (1926), André Breton's Nadja (1928), Perec's Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu Parisien (1975), and Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder (1997).