Global Arc

This course examines the connections between modern French poetry and the Arts. The period under investigation is the 19th and 20th centuries, starting with the Romantics and ending with recent developments in visual arts, poetry, and poetics. The class will be taught at the Princeton Art Museum and each week will focus on one work, style, or art movement and poetry's interaction with them. Readings include poets like Bertrand, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Cendrars, and Breton. The thematic topics that will structure the course are the poem as ekphrasis, the poet as art critic, collaborations between poets and artists, etc.

A study of the French avant-garde movements from 1900 to the 1960s through encounters with literature, visual arts, cinema, and architecture.The course will be structured both chronologically and thematically for a deep exploration of the creations of the French avant-garde: from cubist painting and poetry, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, to Lettrisme and the Internationale Situationiste, the students will be exposed to the most influential artistic experimentations of the 20th century. Topics will include the avant-garde magazine, the avant-garde performance, word and image, avant-garde and the city, the politics of the avant-garde, etc.

In 19th century France, the emerging periodical press lay at the epicenter of public and cultural life. This seminar will explore the press from a number of perspectives: the technological breakthroughs and social upheavals that spurred its growth, the major figures and seminal publications that marked its evolution, and the legal and political forces seeking to unleash or restrain it. Readings include articles from major newspapers and magazines, contemporary literary and cultural criticism, and selections from several "novels of journalism". Class will introduce students to Firestone's collections of 19th century French periodicals.

Perhaps the greatness of works of art and literature -- and of one's life -- can be gauged by the importance they confer to things of no obvious significance: anecdotes, anonymous people, ephemeral characters, trivial details gleaned from daily life. Through readings of texts and film, as well as artworks from Princeton University Art Museum's collections, we will question, far beyond the concerns of minimalism, what is at stake in the possibility of the sublime within the banal. At the crossings of ethics and aesthetics, be raised the questions of what it means to not mean much, and, yet, be absolutely indispensable.