Fall 2008

Pariscape: Imagining Paris in the Twentieth Century

Listed in: First Year Seminar, as FYSE-10

Faculty

Ronald C. Rosbottom (Section 01)

Description

Paris has been for centuries one of the exemplary sites of our urban sensibility, a city that has indelibly and controversially influenced the twentieth-century imagination. Poets, novelists and essayists, painters, photographers and film-makers: all have made use of Paris and its cityscape to examine relationships among technology, literature, city planning, art, social organizations, politics and what we might call the urban imagination. This course will study how these writers and visual artists have seen Paris, and how, through their representations, they created and challenged the “modernist” world view. In order to discover elements of a common memory of Paris, we will study a group of writers (Apollinaire, Calvino, Stein, Hemingway and others), philosophers and social commentators (Simmel, Benjamin, Barthes), filmmakers (Clair, Truffaut, Tati and others), photographers (Atget) and painters (DeChirico, Picasso, Delaunay, and others). Finally, we will look at how such factors as tourism, print media, public works, immigration and suburban development affect a city’s simultaneous and frequently uncomfortable identity as both a geopolitical and an imaginative site. Fall semester. Professor Rosbottom.

FYSE 10 - L/D

Section 01
Tu 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM CONV 308
Th 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM CONV 308

Offerings

2024-25: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2007, Fall 2008, Fall 2010