FRN3890

Paris and modern French culture

B Nelson

8 points - 2 hours per week - First semester - Clayton

Objectives Students taking this interdisciplinary subject - ranging across literature, painting, and social history and theory - will gain a clear understanding of the city's crucial place in the emerging social and cultural forms of modernity.

Synopsis The subject will study symbolic representations of Paris in nineteenth-century writing (Balzac, Sue, Hugo, Baudelaire, Zola, Huysmans) and painting (Manet and Impressionism); it will relate these representations to their historical contexts (the growth and metamorphoses of the city, the 'redevelopment' of Paris by Haussmann, the birth of the cultures of leisure and consumerism); and it will explore the analytical perspectives offered by the social and cultural theories of Walter Benjamin and Pierre Bourdieu.

Assessment Class paper (1000 words written-up in French): 25% - Class test (2 hours): 25% - Essay (3000 words): 50%

Prescribed texts

Course reader (to be purchased from the department)
Huysmans J-K A vau-l'eau Fleuron
Zola E La Curée L de P Classiques

Recommended texts

Benjamin W Charles Baudelaire Payot
Berman M All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity Simon and Schuster
Clark T J The painting of modern life: Paris in the art of Manet and his followers Thames and Hudson
Prendergast C Paris and the nineteenth century Blackwell

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