I'm teaching a class called "Paris in French and Expatriate Literature" at NYU this semester, and I've built a blog for it, where students will post their response papers and I can leave them bits of interesting information.
Check it out and let me know what you think; your input, my esteemed readers, would be invaluable! If you have any ideas as to what I ought to include on the site to enhance my students' experience of the course, please do let me know.
The idea is to look at the figure of the flâneur, and more generally at movement and/in the city; we're reading Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin, Aragon, Breton, Mirrlees, Hemingway, Rhys, Baldwin, Debord, and Guène. I'll have the syllabus up on the site soon, as soon as it's taken its final form.
Mille mercis!
This is so exciting. I know so many people who will be interested in this. Shall pass the word.
Cheers.
It looks really interesting, I’m envious I can’t participate! I hope it goes well.
I suppose you cannot read every writer who lived and wrote in paris, but why not someone alive? Paul Auster, Vila-Matas etc…?
And do you know that book Maisons d’écrivains et d’artistes (Parigramme)?
We’re reading Faiza Guene and watching “La Haine” and “Cléo de 5 à 7″– so toward the end of the semester we’ll be reading/watching living writers/filmmakers.
the Parigramme books are great, aren’t they?
Wasn’t Miller more of a Flaneur than Hemmingway? You can even do some Miller walks in the city! http://www.millerwalks.com/
Another foreign writer who walked endlessly in Paris was Charles Dickens during the periods he lived in the city. As he wrote in his letters, “I have been seeing Paris — wandering into Hospitals, Prisons, Dead-Houses, Operas, Theatres, Concert Rooms, Burial-grounds, Palaces, and Wine Shops. In my unoccupied fortnight of each month, every description of gaudy and ghastly sight [sic] has been passing before me in a rapid Panorama” (more information here – http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/turkey/turlit10.html
Here! http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/turkey/turlit10.html
Thanks Adam! Great ideas.
I’m teaching Hem rather than Miller because having taught Catullus last year I know I haven’t yet mastered my blushing reflex, and there’s nothing more embarrassing than blushing ferociously when you’re trying to teach undergrads…