English 100

Other Readings and Media

Beach, Sylvia: Shakespeare and Company; Bricktop: Bricktop; Cowley, Malcolm: Exile's Return; Fitzgerald, F. Scott: Tender is the Night; Flanner, Janet: Paris Was Yesterday; Hemingway, Ernest: The Sun Also Rises; Hughes, Langston: The Big Sea; James, Henry: The American; McAlmon, Robert & Kay Boyle: Being Geniuses Together; Stein, Gertrude: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Description

We will primarily address American writers who found themselves in Paris and environs during the 1920's, with a brief look backward to their main precursor in the late 19th century, Henry James. The ex-patriots, as these writers and artists were called, wrote both fiction and non-fiction, and sometimes something in between, or even -- as the case of Gertrude Stein demonstrates -- something else entirely. We will be exploring their lives and their fictions in relation both to Paris and to the modernist movements to which it contributed.