Penn Arts & Sciences Logo
 

Americans in Paris

ENGL 286.401
instructor(s):
M 2-5:00

American literature from the perspective of its everlasting captivation  with the city of Paris. Ranging from the 18th century to the present,  we’ll concentrate on major American writers, such as Benjamin Franklin,  Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Ernest  Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Henry Miller, James Baldwin, Janet Flanner,  Elizabeth Bishop, and Edmund White, as well as important artists, filmmakers, and musicians, such as John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Man Ray; Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Donen, Robert  Altman, Wim Wenders; Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, Josephine Baker, Cole Porter, and Miles Davis. We’ll also take note of the everlasting French captivation with America, from Crèvecoeur and Tocqueville to Simone de Beauvoir and MC Solaar. Classes will be organized around important themes and problems, such as: “What Is an American?”; “Sex Tourism and the Founding Fathers”; “Revolution and Terror”; “Pleasure and Alienation”; “Many Modernisms”; “Les Années Folles and All that Jazz”; “Harlem and Paris”; “The Post-Colonial”; “68, or Something”; and “Freedom Fries.” The course will also offer an explicitly transnational perspective on the concept of national literatures. Requirements include several very short essays, an in-class presentation, and a longer final essay. No knowledge of French is required, though bilingual projects are welcome. Interested students are encouraged (but not required) to visit the “Americans in Paris: 1860-1900” exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, which runs from October 24 to January 28.

fulfills requirements