Members: £135
Non-Members: £170
Concessions: £20 (call the office 020 8340 3343)
Time: A: Thursdays 10.30am-12.30pm
B: Thursdays 2pm-4pm
Dates: Thursday 23 January – 3 April
Half Term: Thursday 20 February
Paris in the 1920s and 1930s was a hugely exciting cultural and intellectual centre. It’s pre-war significance as a site of artistic experimentation made it a magnet for French and international writers. Some of the most famous came from Ireland (Joyce, Beckett), America (Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein) and, after Hitler’s ascent to power, Jewish and other political émigrés arrived from Germany and Austria (Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Roth). Paris was also the capital of a major imperial power, drawing people from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean to work and study including Léopold Senghor from Senegal, Ho Chi Minh from Vietnam and Aimé Césaire from Martinique.
This course will explore familiar and lesser-known work of the inter-war period - poetry, novels, films, manifestos, journalism, essays and memoirs – shaped by and shaping a range of ideas including the aftermaths of The Great War, émigré identities, psychoanalysis, the impact of new aesthetic forms and communications media, and responses to the rise of fascism. Alongside particular texts, we will consider some of the institutions (bookshops, magazines, publishers) where writing was exchanged and circulated during this period. For example, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company (library, bookseller and publisher – of Joyce’s Ulysees, most famously) and Adrienne Monnier a bookseller who set up the journal Le Navire d’Argent (The Silver Ship) which published and translated into French, writing by Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman and e e cummings. Less familiar, we will look at the role of the Martiniquais Nardal sisters in creating an international network of and meeting place for Black writers and intellectuals at their ‘Clamart’ salon and in the journal they established, La Revue du Monde Noir.
We will be offering two classes of this course, one in the morning, class A, (10.30-12.30), and one in the afternoon, class B, (2-4). Please ensure that you consider this when booking.
Spring Term Reading List
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) (Penguin Modern Classics, 2001)
Hope Mirrlees, Paris: A Poem (1919) (Faber and Faber 2020)
Colette, The End of Chéri (1926) (trans. Paul Eprile, NYRB, 20022) and Break of Day (1928) (trans. Enid Mcleod, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002)
Langston Hughes, from The Big Sea about his first stay in Paris in 1924 (1939) *
Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) (trans. by Helen Seaver and Richard R. Lane) and Louis Aragon, extracts from Paris Peasant (1926) (trans. Simon Watson Taylor, Picador, 1980) *
Alberto Cavalcanti d. Nothing but Time (film, 1926) **
*available as a photocopy and/or online
** available to watch on YouTube
