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“Do you realize this city is laid out in circles? Like they deliberately designed it to confuse us,” the protagonist of Netflix’s show Emily in Paris (2020) complains of her new home Paris to a fellow American. As her objection to the city’s arrondissements (and preference for the typical grid plan of American cities) indicates, the series is fueled by clichéd representations of American narcissism and entitlement, French hedonism and flamboyancy, as well as failed moments of intercultural translation.
During a time when the global COVID-19 pandemic severely limits international travel (and leads us to binge-watch shows like the above), our seminar is interested in literary representations of travel and tourism by Americans to/in European capitals. We will discuss questions of (self)discovery, national identity (or its limitations), or commercial exploitation. As an example that demonstrates the complex situation of American authors writing from and/or about Europe, consider this passage from James Baldwin:
"In my necessity to find the terms on which my experience could be related to that of others, Negroes and whites, writers and non-writers, I proved, to my astonishment, to be as American as any Texas G.I. And I found my experience was shared by every American writer I knew in Paris. Like me, they had been divorce from their origins, and it turned out to make very little difference that the origins of white Americans were European and mine were African – they were no more at home in Europe than I was" (Nobody Knows My Name, 1961, pp. 17-18).
Whether they identify as temporary tourists on “the grand tour,” fugitives on the run from unjust persecution, expatriate modernist writers, postwar leftist internationalists, or cosmopolitans, American writers have visited European cities for many different reasons. The first half of the seminar will focus on tourism and travel in literature prior to 1900. Among the writers whose work we will read and discuss are Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry James. As more “recent” modernist and postmodernist writing, in the second half of the seminar, we will read writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Ben Lerner. |
