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French Language & Liberal Arts
2008 Fall Semester - Course Description
Writer's Workshop: Expatriate Writing in Paris
CEA Partner Institution: CEA GlobalCampus: Paris
Location: Paris, FrancePrimary Subject Area: English Language & Literature
Level(s): 300
UNH Course Code: ENG360
Instruction in: English
Recommended Semester Credits: 3
Contact Hours: 45
Prerequisites: Two semesters of English composition
Description
This is a practical workshop in reading and creative writing in which you explore both the external life of Paris, past and present, and your many internal responses to it in order to develop your own voice, style and technique as a writer living in this City of Light. You will draw the inspiration for this creative exploration from what writers before you have recounted about the experience of discovering, living in, and struggling with the exhilarating yet maddening and often cruel city that is Paris. And while you will read from well-known American writers such as Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and James Baldwin (to mention a few), you will also discover the surprising literary work of Eastern European, African, and West-Indian expatriates who also wrote about experiencing Paris. What is it about Paris that continues to give writers, artists, and thinkers from abroad the freedom and stimulation to produce work that has often transformed the cultural scene in their native land? How, for example, did writing in a Paris café enable Hemingway to recreate his youthful experiences in upper Michigan? In what way did the experiments of early 20th century painting in Paris contribute to Gertrude Stein?s revolutionizing American literature? What does the concept of Négritude and its African and West Indian exponents Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire ? not to mention such American admirers as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes ? owe to the intellectual crucible of Paris? These are just some of the issues that you will be investigating as a group.
Your field assignments will include study excursions to many of the historic literary sites of Paris such as the Left Banks cafes Flore and Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Villa Seurat where Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin lived, the cafés and back streets of Montparnasse (including the Passage d?Enfer), the 'Beat Hotel', the original Shakespeare & Co. and other landmarks in the Latin Quarter. Additional suggested literary itineraries will take you to the eccentric neighborhoods, out-of-the-way gardens, morbid cemeteries, bizarre public monuments, secretive catacombs and dank city sewers, all of which have been part of the city's urban literary inspiration. Off the beaten track, you will seek to capture and put to paper both the 'movable feast' and the down-and-out hardships that have made Paris the literary capital it is.
Throughout the course, you will keep a writer's journal where you record your impressions, observations and perhaps chaotic emotive responses to the urban environment of your expatriate foster home. You will report back to the rest of the class about your forays and will choose passages from your Paris journal to expand into regular written assignments. And while you will produce a collection of your own essays, poems and short stories all inspired by Paris, you will also collaborate with your fellow students in the conception, writing, editing, and printing of the class?s written work.
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