French 271
Portrait of the Artist as a Flâneur: Modernity and the City in Nineteenth-Century Paris
Taught by Professor Catherine Nesci
The seminar will be conducted in French, and open to students of other departments than French and Italian.
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How was Paris deployed and dramatized, metamorphosed and transfigured in nineteenth-century French culture? Why did Paris become the dream world of modernity? How was the city reinvented and rebuilt in the mid-nineteenth century? What impact did this thorough restructuring of urban space and buildings have on art and literature? The main figure who will guide our exploration of the labyrinthine city will be the "flâneur," the hero of modern life who engages in purposeless strolling about the city, looks freely without being seen, and is exposed to fleeting, anonymous encounters, as is the case for Baudelaire's bohemian flâneur.
Our main critical readings will be drawn from recent intellectual and cultural histories of urban space and modernity. We will address the transition from elite to mass culture in nineteenth-century Paris by focusing our attention on such topics as the invention of the everyday and modern life; the expository spirit and world exhibitions; vision and spectatorship; commodities and consumer desires. In addition we will discuss women's interaction with the city, and will comment Janet Wolff's seminal essay on the absent female bohemian, "The Invisible Flâneuse : Women and the Literature of Modernity."
Primary sources:
In addition to visual and print sources taken from popular culture, our readings of the painting of modern life by nineteenth-century writer will include Balzac (1799-1850), Baudelaire (1821-1867), Sand (1804-1876), Flaubert (1821-1880), and Zola (1840-1902) as well as painters associated with Impressionism and modernism: Manet, Monet, Caillebotte, Cassat and Morisot.
- Balzac: Le Père Goriot ; Illusions Perdues.
- Sand: Excerpts of Histoire de ma vie; Delphine de Girardin: Excerpts of Lettres Parisiennes.
- Baudelaire: section, « Tableaux parisiens », from Les Fleurs du mal. Selection from Les petits poèmes en prose.
- Flaubert: L'Education sentimentale.
- Zola: Au Bonheur des dames.
A short bibliography (items on reserve at RBS):
- Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1982.
- Blanchard, Marc Eli. In Search of the City: Engels, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. Saratoga: Amna Libri, 1985.
- Bowlby, Rachel. Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola. NY: Methuen, 1985.
- Caws, Mary Ann. City Images. NY: Gordon & Breach, 1991.
- Clark, T. J. The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers . NY: Knopf, 1985.
- Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. Paris as Revolution. Writing the 19th-Century City. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: UC Press, 1994.
- Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping. Cinema and the Postmodern. UC Press, 1993.
- Hamon, Philippe. Expositions. Berkeley/Los Angeles: UC Press, 1992.
- Herbert, Robert L. Impressionism. Art, Leisure and Parisian Society . New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1988 .
- Marcus, Sharon. Apartment Stories. City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: UC Press, 1999.
- Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. NY/London: Verso, 1998.
- Pinkney, David. Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.
- Prendergast, Christopher. Paris and the Nineteenth Century. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1992.
- Rice, Shelley. Parisian Views. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
- Saalman, Howard. Haussmann: Paris Transformed. NY: Georges Braziller, 1971.
- Seigel, Jerrold. Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930. NY: Viking, 1986.
- Sharpe, William S. Unreal Cities. Baltimore: JHUP, 1990.
- Sharpe, William and Leonard Wallock, ed. Visions of the Modern City. Essays in History, Art and Literature. Baltimore: JHUP, 1987.
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