The myth of Paris
Albert Thibaudet in his Storia della letteratura francese writes that since Stendhal, the novel was always a conquest or a revenge of a provincial genius but with Proust everything changes. If we exclude the journeys to Combray and Balbec, the thousands of pages of the Recherche are stetted in Paris: a weightless town or dotted in his brutal reality; enlightened in salons or nocturnal and painted as a set of the Arabian nights, the Paris of Proust is also bombarded, lost, silent and perverse.
Thenceforth many others writers tried to explore Paris with its boulevards and mysteries, the downtown and the suburbs. Giovanni Macchia said that Paris is a light symbol that sinks his foots in the dark and the writers that write on Paris are like geologists.
The course proposes to shed light on this resistant myth, seeking to analyze its force and its flew. Since Aragon to Duras, Queneau to Clerc, we propose to read about the Paris des années folles and the Paris occupied, then the capitalistic and americanized town to the latest and conflictual decades.
What is Paris today? A museum, a memory town, a spiritual town or a struggle town? We will try to answer to these hypotheses following the enormous mine of images and words, smells and recollections that embrace Paris and help us to read it.