HUHI 6313.001
Paris, Capital of the 19th Century

Michael Wilson
JO 3.314
(o): 972-883-2080
mwilson@utdallas.edu

University of Texas at Dallas
Spring 1999
Wednesday 9:00-11:45 a.m.

Walter Benjamin, in a 1935 programme for his never-completed Arcades project, proclaimed Paris to be the capital of the nineteenth-century. Benjamin's writings urge a close examination of life in nineteenth-century Paris and of the French capital's greatest poet, Charles Baudelaire. Such an examination, he seems to suggest, will reveal the processes of modernity in their earliest, still-volatile forms.

This seminar aims to test Benjamin's account of the origins of modern culture. We will test it against more conventional histories of nineteenth-century Paris as well as against Benjamin's favored materials, the literature, art criticism, and political writings produced in France between 1815 and 1890. Our goal is to investigate the relations between nineteenth-century modernity and modernism and, in so doing, to shape our own histories of Paris in the 1800s.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

• Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
• Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, The Painter of Modern Life
• J. P. Bury, France, 1814-1940
• Gustave Flaubert, The Sentimental Education
• J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature
• David Jordan, Transforming Paris
• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoléon
• Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century
• Émile Zola, Nana

Texts marked * are available in a packet from Off-Campus Books.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS/EVALUATION CRITERIA:

Seminar preparation and attendance; reading journal; one 12-to-15-page paper on course materials.

READING JOURNAL REQUIREMENTS

I will be collecting your journal on an irregular basis and will provide at least one week's notice.

You must write an entry for each class meeting which should address that week's assigned readings. In weeks in which you are assigned a single primary source, focus on it and make whatever reference to secondary materials you desire. In weeks in which a variety of sources are assigned, focus on the inter-relations between these materials. Your entries should be written before the class in which we discuss the texts, though you may if you wish add an additional entry after our discussion.

Journal entries should be typed double-spaced and be at minimum a single page in length. There is no maximum length. I do not expect perfectly polished prose.

Please identify each entry with a title across the top of the page. Place the entries in a folder with your name on it.

The purpose of a journal is to give you the freedom to express your initial reaction to the course materials. At the same time, your journal should show a growing intellectual sophistication about the material. DO NOT SUMMARIZE THE READINGS. Try to avoid the "isn't it awful" response. Instead, work to understand and to contextualize the material and its implications. You should increasingly be able to compare texts and draw upon previously discussed material to understand the readings. I will specifically be looking for an intellectual effort to understand and situate the material within a historical context. I will also be looking for improvement in your understanding of the course materials.

I will make brief comments in response to your entries but will only grade the journal at its completion. That grade, comprising 25% of your final course grade, will be based on your ability to engage and explore the course materials, not on the specific content of your entries.