Descriptif

Since before Charlemagne, there has been a love story between Paris and its citizens. Paris captured artists’ imagination as early as the Middle Ages with the “chanson de gestes,” but in the nineteenth century, it became a myth in French literature.

We will explore this myth and its evolution since the 1830s, starting with the “rooting” of the myth in Balzac’s works. We will also study how the novel developed as a city-defined genre. Authors that will be analyzed include: Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Zola and Apollinaire. We will study the evolution of the myth in literature and compare the literary constructions of Paris to the physical reality described by urban historians.

Though we will concentrate on Paris in its literary representations, comparisons will also involve other forms of art such as painting and photography, in order to illustrate the omnipresence of Paris in French imagination. A range of mediums will be discussed, but literature will be used as the grounding element for discussion in each case. Accordingly, we will examine works from: Delacroix, Monet, Manet, Renoir, Pissaro, Degas, Caillebotte, Delaunay, Marville, Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Klapish and Jeunet. Students will be encouraged to draw comparisons between different forms of representations, across time periods, and to compare and contrast differences between mediums, as well as time periods.