Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity

by J. Gerald Kennedy

Between 1900 and 1940, Paris was the capital of high modernism and the center of artistic experimentation―Paris was "where the twentieth century was," claimed Gertrude Stein. In this book, J. Gerald Kennedy explores how living in Paris shaped the careers and literary works of five expatriate Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Djuna Barnes. Kennedy shows that the writings of these authors reveal their various struggles to accommodate themselves to a complex, foreign scene, to construct an expatriate self, or to understand the contradictions of American identity. He treats these figures and their narratives as instances of the profound effect of place on writing and on the formation of the self.

According to Kennedy, Stein's Paris, France presents an abstraction, a series of random and discontinuous images refracted into a theory of the French way of life. Her self- portrait in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , however, hinges on a contrast between the outside world of galleries, studios, and exhibitions and her inner domain at 27, rue de Fleurus. Hemingway's conflict with Paris, says Kennedy, betrays both an attraction to its danger and a disgust with its profligacy, as seen in the ambivalent imagery of The Sun Also Rises . Miller's Paris emerges in his Letters to Emil and Tropic of Cancer as a tormenting world of alleyways, sewers, and flophouses that nevertheless becomes a site of deliverance where Miller discovers himself as a literary subject. The nocturnal, unreal Paris of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and Barnes's Nightwood reflects the disorientation of modernism, which parallel and intensify the estrangement of exile.

Genres: Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity and coeditor (with Jackson R. Bryer) of French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad. He was advisory editor of volumes 1–3 of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway, under the general editorship of Sandra Spanier, and he is coediting a forthcoming volume of Hemingway letters, the final years. He is also the author of a number of essays on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and expatriate Paris, and he edited Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. His publications on nineteenth-century American literature include Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing and (with fellowship support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the NEH) a wide-ranging cultural history, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe.

Reviews

[Kirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fabulous analysis of Stein, Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller, and Fitzgerald. Charms with the virtue of being eminently readable and yet intellectually compelling. This is the book I learned to write academic books and articles from---Jerry taught me a lot not only about content, but style and accessibility.

[The Half-blood Reader]

Autumn 2011
College reads: I only read chapters/sections relevant to my studies, hence the dnf (Chapter 3, City of Danger: Hemingway's Paris)

[Meade · Rating 5 out of 5]

J. Gerald Kennedy's book is unique in that he writes about Paris and Americans in France with none of the sham and pretension that plagues many other texts on the topic. This text is academic and has a significant amount of data, though the author's style weaves it into a pleasant read.

[Janice]

2/12/10
inside higher ed http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/t...