FRENCH 237 Saint-Germain-des-Prés

The legendary sixth arrondissement neighborhood as a cultural crucible in post-Liberation Paris.  Saint-Germain-des-Prés as the locus of an unprecedented concentration of literary and artistic talent after 1945: existentialists, writers, artists, café intellectuals, and non-conformists.  The discovery of jazz and American popular culture.  Saint-Germain and the myth of the Left Bank.  Study of texts by Sartre, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian, Raymond Queneau; songs by Juliette Gréco and others; newsreel, film and audio documents of the period.  Prerequisite: At least one unit of 205, 206, 207, 208, or 209, an SAT II score of 690-800, an equivalent departmental placement score, or an AP score of 5.  Not open to students who have taken FREN 223, Topic B in Spring 2003 or FREN 228 in Wintersession 2006.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, existentialism, Les Deux Magots, le jazz hot—the myth of Saint-Germain in the 1940s and ‘50s has endured, even though the area itself has become relentlessly upscale, the old restaurants and bookstores yielding to retailers of the chic and deluxe.

In fact, few neighborhoods of Paris have a past as rich as that of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.  This course will study the intellectual and social history of Saint-Germain, concentrating on the magical period after the end of World War II when a generation of avant-garde artists, writers and thinkers made Saint-Germain a hotbed of non-conformity and intellectual ferment.  Poised between surrealism and the theater of the absurd, between the intellectual engagement of the Resistance and the hardening of post-war ideologies with the rise of the Communist Party, Saint-Germain in the ‘50s was the last Parisian belle époque.  The synthesis of ideas and art created in this brief decade was profoundly French, but it brought Saint-Germain a degree of worldwide recognition that no French intellectual movement has quite equalled since.

At the magnetic center of this phenomenon were Jean-Paul Sartre and the philosophical and literary doctrine he appropriated from Heidegger and Kierkegaard but made famous in French guise: existentialism.  Philosophical existentialism à la Sartre is a forbidding creed, but the term became associated much more loosely in the public mind with the rebellious lifestyle of a young generation that had emerged from the dark days of war to discover, via the new media of records and LPs, Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins, be-bop and bobby-sox, and wanted to spend its nights in the nightclubs and caves of Saint-Germain.

Written work: an hour exam; two short papers; a final paper.  No final exam.

Readings: Camus, La Chute; excerpts from Actuelles; De Beauvoir, La Force des choses (excerpts); Queneau, Exercices de style; Sartre, La Putain respectueuse, Huis clos; Vian, L’Ecume des jours, writings on jazz

Songs by Edith Piaf, Juliette Gréco, Yves Montand, Charles Trenet and others

Films: Jacques Tati, Jour de fête; Jacques Becker, Rendez-vous de juillet