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Napoléon III and Baron Haussmann’s physical transformation of Paris was the most imitated work of city planning in modern history.   Haussmannization imprinted new railroad stations, libraries, housing, parks, and boulevards onto the medieval map of the city.   Controversial in its own day, the reconstruction of Paris between 1853 and 1875 is the subject of continued critique.   Was the transformation a necessary leap into an industrialized future?   Or was it a rapid process of destruction and ideological alignment?   This course examines representations of ‘new’ spaces in Paris and considers how space itself can become living memory – and how a radical pictorial vocabulary can be made to represent it.   We will read primary texts that mourn the loss of an incongruent, ‘authentic’ urban realm, as well as recent theoretical essays that re-examine the intersection of physical space, social practice, nostalgia, and melancholic pleasure.   The class is designed as an interdisciplinary foray into late nineteenth-century Paris’s various sites and spaces of enchantment.   We will read Ludovic Halévy’s best-selling novel, La Famille Cardinal (1873) and Zola’s glitterati tale of bourgeois consumption, The Ladies’ Paradise (1883).    Two weeks of the class will be spent examining the role of gender and sexuality in the new spaces of the city, such as the place of the prostitute, the status of bourgeois masculinity, and the problems with the private / public divide.   The entire course is concerned with the formal practices of Parisian artists.   We will analyze works by Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Pissarro, Caillebotte, Tissot, Lautrec, Seurat, and others.   Students are responsible for two exams, panel discussions, and one research paper on a topic of their choice.

(Vinson)

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