Remembering Paris in Text and Film

Description

This new book explores aspects of Paris from the time of Baudelaire within the context of nostalgia and modernity. It seeks to see Paris, through written texts and movies, from the outside, and as both concrete reality and a collection of myths associated with it.

This collection of essays contains original research on the intersections of several disciplinary approaches to Paris and modernity. It is designed to make these complex concepts speak to an academic audience, but also to an undergraduate readership. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines.

The book springs from two interdisciplinary courses on Paris and modernity – Paris at Dawn, which looks at modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Paris at Midnight, which looks at left-bank culture following the Second World War – coordinated by Associate Professor Alistair Rolls (French studies) and Professor Marguerite Johnson (classics and classical reception) at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

While it is driven by original research, notably by examining the intersections of any number of disciplinary lenses and positions on Paris and modernity, it is also designed to make these complex concepts understandable for a wider readership, including undergraduates. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines (with their monoliths and taxonomies); at the same time, it will also provide clarity and, importantly, make logical links between, for example, the past and present, myth and reality, poetry and history, and various schools and movements, including psychology, poetics, poststructuralism and critical theory, classical reception, feminism and existentialism. All contributors are academics working in the School of Humanities and Social Science, who have contributed to the development and delivery of these twinned courses. 

Remembering Paris investigates Paris as an urban and poetic site of remembrance. For Charles Baudelaire, the streets of Paris conjured visions of the past even as he contemplated the present. This book investigates this and other cases of double vision, tracing back from Baudelaire into antiquity, but also following Baudelaire forwards as his poetry is translated, received and referenced in texts and films in the twentieth century and beyond.

Primary readership will be academics, educators, scholars and students – both undergraduate and postgraduate. The chapter structure and the relatively classic choice of authors and filmmakers is well suited to course use.

Many universities are now turning to interdisciplinary courses, which combine historical, cultural, literary and artistic approaches to thematic studies. This book, therefore, will also be of interest to academics teaching courses on French language, literature and culture; literary studies; film studies; cultural studies; women studies, gender studies; LGBTQ+ studies; even human geography. 

Acknowledgements 

Introduction: Remembering in Paris and Paris as Remembering

1. Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen: Re-presenting Paris – Alistair Rolls

2. Baudelaire and the Classical Tradition: Virgil, Ovid and Sappho in Paris – Marguerite Johnson

3. Sappho in the Salons – Marguerite Johnson

4. Memory, Modernity and the City in Agnès Varda’s Paris Films – Felicity Chaplin

5. Looking (Back) at the Moon in Parisian Cinema – Alistair Rolls

6. Breathless in Paris – Christopher Falzon

7. As Sedate as Swans: The Parisian Side of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée – Alistair Rolls

8. ‘La forme d’une ville/Change plus vite, hélas! […]’: Translation and the Changing Modes of Urban Cognition – Clive Scott

9. Paris, Capital of the Australian Poetic Avant-Garde: Christopher Brennan’s ‘Musicopoematographoscope’,

John Tranter’s ‘Desmond’s Coupé’ and Chris Edwards’ ‘A Fluke’ and After Naptime – David Musgrave

10. Forms of Remembrance in the Sculpted Verse of Louise Colet, Anaïs Ségalas and Some of their Male Contemporaries – Daniel A. Finch-Race and Valentina Gosetti

Contributors

Index

Sujets

• 20th Century
• Modern
• French Film
• Literature
• Modern history
• Index of urban studies articles
• Modernism
• Poetry
• Remembrance
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Cultural Studies
• European
• Paris
• French
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Agnès Varda
• France
• Charles Baudelaire

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789384208
• Langue: English

Extrait

Remembering Paris in Text and Film

Remembering Paris in Text and Film
EDITED BY
Alistair Rolls and Marguerite Johnson
First published in the UK in 2021 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2021 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2021 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or byany means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, orotherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: MPS Limited
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Christelle Gonzalo
Frontispiece image: A Communication , (Edwards 2014: [7])
Production manager: Georgia Earl
Typesetter: MPS Limited
Print ISBN 978-1-78938-418-5
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-419-2
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-420-8
Printed and bound by T.J. Printing Ltd
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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Remembering in Paris and Paris as Remembering
1. Charles Baudelaire s Paris Spleen : Re-presenting Paris
Alistair Rolls
2. Baudelaire and the Classical Tradition: Virgil, Ovid and Sappho in Paris
Marguerite Johnson
3. Sappho in the Salons
Marguerite Johnson
4. Memory, Modernity and the City in Agn s Varda s Paris Films
Felicity Chaplin
5. Looking (Back) at the Moon in Parisian Cinema
Alistair Rolls
6. Breathless in Paris
Christopher Falzon
7. As Sedate as Swans: The Parisian Side of Jean-Paul Sartre s La Naus e
Alistair Rolls
8. La forme d une ville/Change plus vite, h las! [ ] : Translation and the Changing Modes of Urban Cognition
Clive Scott
9. Paris, Capital of the Australian Poetic Avant-Garde: Christopher Brennan s Musicopoematographoscope', John Tranter s Desmond s Coup ' and Chris Edwards' A Fluke' and After Naptime
David Musgrave
10. Forms of Remembrance in the Sculpted Verse of Louise Colet, Ana s S galas and Some of their Male Contemporaries
Daniel A. Finch-Race and Valentina Gosetti

Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
As will be touched on in our editors introduction below, this book has its origins in two interdisciplinary undergraduate courses that Marguerite and Alistair ran at the University of Newcastle, Australia in 2018. Paris was the hook used to bring together staff and students from various streams of the Humanities; our interests and the focus of our discussion included modernity, nostalgia and reception. This idea that the urban experience that Paris presents to us today is necessarily alive with the ghosts of the past, and of course the oxymoronic tension of such lively ghosts, morphed into the present volume with its theme of remembering.
We should like to thank the following people for the part that they played in this journey: all our contributors, who have been so supportive and professional throughout; our colleagues at the University of Newcastle who helped bring the courses to life, including Rebecca Beirne, Hamish Ford and M. B. Kirchen; our undergraduate students, whose interest and generous feedback encouraged us to pursue the idea of this book; Marguerite s amazing postgraduates Tanika Koosmen and Adam Turner, who generously attended the tutorials and shared their thoughts with us and the students; and, finally, the team at Intellect, especially Tim Mitchell and Georgia Earl but also the anonymous reviewers whose positive and detailed feedback was very much appreciated.
The cover image was supplied by Alistair s colleague and friend Christelle Gonzalo. Christelle is inter alia one of the foremost authorities on legendary author and Parisian identity Boris Vian (on whom a chapter in this book was considered); she is also an archivist, historian and owner of the antiquarian bookshop Sur le Fil de Paris, which is located on the rue de l Ave Maria, in the 4th arrondissement, just across the Seine from the le Saint-Louis and thus just a short distance from where this image was taken. The photograph is entitled La Cit depuis les tours de Notre-Dame ; it dates from around 1860. The photographer is unknown. We are extremely grateful to Christelle for finding this photograph, which is a beautiful embodiment of remembrance, and for allowing us to use it here.
Introduction: Remembering in Paris and Paris as Remembering
Alistair Rolls and Marguerite Johnson
Baudelaire, I think of you!
Andromaque, je pense vous! [Andromache, I think of you!] (Baudelaire 1998 : 172 [173]). So begins Le Cygne [The Swan] , Baudelaire s famous lament on the pace of change in the Paris cityscape under Haussmann s programme of urban renewal. This is a poem about Paris; it is an immediate and visceral response to the changes of the fabric of the city as it changes before the poet s eyes. Its present tense captures this act of thinking in medias res . And yet, the object of these thoughts, we are told, is Andromache, not Paris. If Andromache and her grief, her past, are provoked by Baudelaire s use of the present, then the Paris in which the poet is located, and on whose streets we readers are invited to position ourselves, is also and at the same time a metaphor and thus rendered absent to self. The disjuncture of this first line is metonymic of the poem, which is the site of Baudelaire s signature chiasmata as much as it is of Haussmann s urbanization; it is also, we argue, metonymic of Paris itself. To think of you is also, almost, not to think of you; that is, by thinking of Paris, I also think of Andromache. To think of Paris, in this framework, is to understand metaphorically what is before one s eyes, or to hold under tension what is present and what is past, what is real and what is legend. At the same time, if we reverse the polarity, the very writing of poetry (with its metaphors and artistic devices of a timeless past, or of the past as timelessness) is undermined here - as the poem takes shape - by the presence of the real world. The city s refusal to settle on a given form (one metaphor gives way to another and another), that is, to hold its shape long enough for us to take it in and account for it, is embodied by this taking shape of a poem that itself eschews self-coincidence.
For the purposes of the present volume, which will think of Paris through various lenses, this tension is the stuff of remembrance. Paris causes us to remember itself as other, and we create Paris through memory. As we observe above, by thinking of Paris, the poet also thinks of Andromache and this dual or even potentially multi-layered system of remembrance is not only a marker of Baudelaire s responses to the city but also a common inscription of French literature and art. It is also present in historical / historical memory, as in Gilles Corrozet s 1532 travelogue and urban history, La Fleur des antiquitez de Paris ( The Flower of Antiquity of Paris ). Therein, Corrozet includes the legendary genealogy that situates Paris as the second Troy (something later not lost on Baudelaire), composing a guidebook that creates a legible sense of place (Hodges 2008 : 136). Elizabeth Hodges reminds us of Pierre Nora s Les Lieux de m moire ( Realms of Memory ), in which he traverses the interrelated categories of place, memory and history (Hodges 2008 : 142). 1
Furthermore, this is a city that has long been a site of remembrance (long enough perhaps for us to consider it, timelessly, to have always been so). This explains Baudelaire s thinking of Andromache, who, as a model of grief, is herself remembering. The past is not just remembered (as something complete) therefore; rather, it is reconstructed, recalled as a site of remembrance. The result for Baudelaire is something of a chicken-and-egg situation, which is captured by the reference to the poet s m moire fertile [fertile memory] , which is said to be seeded by thoughts of the mythical figure (1998: 174 [175]). In fact, the speaker s memory is at once inseminated by Andromache and always already fertile at the time when he walks across le nouveau Carrousel [the modern Carrousel] (1998: 174 [175]). Does Andromache (as a metaphor for Paris) make him remember, or does Paris become a metaphor, and thus Andromache - as thoughts form into a poem (about the non-taking of form) - because he was, in the pre-diegetic instant before conjuring his first word, remembering? It seems crucial that this conundrum not be resolved. [L]a forme d une ville [the form a city takes] , he says, changes more quickly than the mortal heart (1998: 174 [175]). Certainly, it is not the simple fact of Paris s continuous, and rapid, changing of form that causes the poet to remember, for it appears equally true that the poet s remembrance renders him unable to settle on a stable poetic form for the city, hence the disruption of metaphor, which gives rise to a chain, or bedraggled procession, of metaphors. Metaphor itself ends up disrupted and dragged through dusty (de)construction sites. Memory here is simultaneously about settling on shapes and shapes refusal to settle; this is remembrance as undecidability, and thus, to draw on Shoshana Felman s famous defence of textual/critical ambiguity (1977), as an attempt at salvation.
If resistance to form, perhaps we might call it a classical form, is the result of urban renewal, it is equally important that form is nonetheless taken, and no less classical a form than that of Andromache. The shock of modernity breaks forms, but it does not break with the past; the remembrance of the past may well deform, but it also creates forms. In the absence, the death even, of clear metaphor, we stand witness to the creat