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American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment
By Donald Pizer
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Description
Pizer elucidates a striking difference between the genres of expatriate autobiography and fiction, and arranges his discussion accordingly. He first examines Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1934, all of which depict the emergence and triumph of the creative imagination within the Paris context. He then turns to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, John Dos Passos' Nineteen-Nineteen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, which dramatize the tragic potential in seeking a richness and intensity of creative expression within the city's setting. Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, a relatively late example of American expatriate writing, constitutes a synthesis of the two tendencies, Pizer shows.
Through careful readings of the texts, Pizer identifies both the common threads in the expatriates' response to the Paris moment and the distinctive expression each work gives to their shared experience. Most important, he addresses the neglected question of how the portrayal of the Paris scene helps shape a specific work's themes and form. He traces such experimental devices as fragmented or cubistic narrative forms, the dramatic representation of consciousness, and sexual explicitness, and explores the powerful and evocative tropes of mobility and feeding.
As Pizer demonstrates, Paris between the two world wars was for the American expatriates more than a geographical entity. It was a state of mind, an experience, that engendered the formal expression of a personal aesthetic. The engaging and significant interplay between artist, place, and innovative self-reflexive forms composes, Pizer maintains, the most distinctive contribution of expatriate writing to the literary movement called high modernism.
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Number of Pages:
149
Release Date:
1997-09-01
Publication Date:
1997-09-01
Publisher:
LSU Press
Languages:
Original:
English
ISBN10:
0807122203
ISBN13:
9780807122204
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
Weight:
236 g
Height:
153 cm
Width:
230 cm
Thickness:
11 cm
Condition
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Very good
Almost no signs of wear. Book pages have no markings, accessories are intact and all other media are in good condition.
€12,49