CLCS 205T Paris Protagonist: Lost in Translation
This creative writing course fosters and critical and creative encounter with the city of Paris, approached as a mythical urban landscape; one that lives and breathes as a protagonist through French literature and film. Students will critically examine how Paris has been imagined, constructed, and contested across time, considering the ways in which artistic and theoretical discourses shape and are shaped by the city’s evolving cultural identity.
The travel component serves as the culmination of this encounter, moving students from analysis to creative praxis through daily site-specific writing prompts and workshop-style discussions. Core questions driving this exploration include: In what forms does the city persist as a protagonist across literary and cinematic history? What voices emerge from its ruins and reinventions? How do translation and transfiguration mediate our understanding of place, memory, and loss? And how might deepened cultural awareness complicate the allure of Paris as an aestheticized and mythologized space?
Three thematic modules structure this inquiry:
The poetry of Charles Baudelaire, foregrounding the spatial poetics of the city;
Surrealism’s paradoxical approach to time—both defining and destabilizing Parisian temporality;
The French New Wave (contrasted with foreign cinematic representations of Paris), with a focus on translation, transfiguration, and the allegorical play of light and otherness.
(Course previously taught as CLCS 105T)