Paris Between the Wars: Creative Research, Migration, and the Avant Garde

Undergraduate / Graduate

In this creative research course, students will be keeping an in-depth notebook as we make our way through archives, historic sites, museums, and the streets of the city. In the years between the two world wars, Paris was a clash of forces, memories, celebrations and dread. The people making their way through the city found brilliant and idiosyncratic creative research methods. There were American jazz musicians and novelists who had fought in the war or who were escaping Jim Crow at home; German intellectuals who had begun to leave Germany; denizens of fallen empires at work on the United Nations and Red Cross internationalism; French booksellers who supported refugee books and writers; designers of the Colonial Exposition of 1931 forging a new imperial vision; Surrealist poets, collage artists, and photographers with nightmares at once commemorative and predictive. As we develop our own methods, we'll read snippets from Walter Benjamin's Archives Project, from the memoirs of Victor Serge, Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, Ada "Bricktop" Smith, Ernest Hemingway, Stefan Zweig, Paul Éluard, George Orwell and others, we'll study art at the Pompidou Center and the Musée de l'Art Moderne, and we'll explore the Historical Library of the City of Paris, the Museum of the Préfecture de Police, the streets around Montmartre, and the Bois de Vincennes in search of traces of the avant-garde migrants who passed through these places and the research they left us.