Paris, Capital of Signs: Literature Across Borders

No city is as intimately bound to the book as Paris… For, over the centuries, the ivy of learned pages has clung to the banks of the Seine: Paris is the great reading room of a library through which the Seine flows.” This remark by Walter Benjamin illustrates how the City of Light embodies what another German thinker, Karlheinz Stierle, has called a “capital of signs.”

This course aims to illustrate and to put these propositions to the test. It offers students a panorama of Parisian modernity by showing, through textual analysis, how Paris came to be constituted as a literary capital. It will then examine, through the testimonies and writings of authors from around the world—Ernest Hemingway, Julio Cortázar, Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Anna Akhmatova, Anna Maria Ortese, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin—the validity of Benjamin’s insight.

Each session will be devoted to the study of a single author. Students will be invited to engage in discussion based on supplementary materials drawn from a range of disciplines and perspectives (humanities, literary studies, audiovisual sources, etc.). These analyses will be complemented by a literary and cultural walk through Paris.

Particular attention will be paid to a number of key concepts: bohemia, the flâneur, aura, allegory, arcades, phantasmagoria, nostalgia, salons, literary cafés, and so forth.

The course is divided into three parts:

– the first devoted to French literature;

– the second to Paris and world literature;

– the third to “Black Paris,” colonial and postcolonial.