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Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis
A year in Paris . . . since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision—and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. Dreaming in French tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary American women.
All three women would go on to become icons, key figures in American cultural, intellectual, and political life, but when they embarked for France, they were young, little-known, uncertain about their future, and drawn to the culture, sophistication, and drama that only Paris could offer. Yet their backgrounds and their dreams couldn’t have been more different. Jacqueline Bouvier was a twenty-year-old debutante, a Catholic girl from a wealthy East Coast family. Susan Sontag was twenty-four, a precocious Jewish intellectual from a North Hollywood family of modest means, and Paris was a refuge from motherhood, a failing marriage, and graduate work in philosophy at Oxford. Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a prominent African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, found herself the only black student in her year abroad program—in a summer when all the news from Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence.
Kaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of these young women, tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that they found there. For all three women, France was far from a passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, the year abroad continued to influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives. Jackie Kennedy carried her love of France to the White House and to her later career as a book editor, bringing her cultural and linguistic fluency to everything from art and diplomacy to fashion and historic restoration—to the extent that many, including Jackie herself, worried that she might seem “too French.” Sontag found in France a model for the life of the mind that she was determined to lead; the intellectual world she observed from afar during that first year in Paris inspired her most important work and remained a key influence—to be grappled with, explored, and transcended—the rest of her life. Davis, meanwhile, found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense of political exile from racism at home and brought a sense of solidarity with Algerian independence. For her, Paris was a city of political commitment, activism, and militancy, qualities that would deeply inform her own revolutionary agenda and soon make her a hero to the French writers she had once studied.
Kaplan, whose own junior year abroad played a prominent role in her classic memoir, French Lessons, spins these three quite different stories into one evocative biography, brimming with the ferment and yearnings of youth and shot through with the knowledge of how a single year—and a magical city—can change a whole life. No one who has ever dreamed of Paris should miss it.
All three women would go on to become icons, key figures in American cultural, intellectual, and political life, but when they embarked for France, they were young, little-known, uncertain about their future, and drawn to the culture, sophistication, and drama that only Paris could offer. Yet their backgrounds and their dreams couldn’t have been more different. Jacqueline Bouvier was a twenty-year-old debutante, a Catholic girl from a wealthy East Coast family. Susan Sontag was twenty-four, a precocious Jewish intellectual from a North Hollywood family of modest means, and Paris was a refuge from motherhood, a failing marriage, and graduate work in philosophy at Oxford. Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a prominent African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, found herself the only black student in her year abroad program—in a summer when all the news from Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence.
Kaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of these young women, tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that they found there. For all three women, France was far from a passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, the year abroad continued to influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives. Jackie Kennedy carried her love of France to the White House and to her later career as a book editor, bringing her cultural and linguistic fluency to everything from art and diplomacy to fashion and historic restoration—to the extent that many, including Jackie herself, worried that she might seem “too French.” Sontag found in France a model for the life of the mind that she was determined to lead; the intellectual world she observed from afar during that first year in Paris inspired her most important work and remained a key influence—to be grappled with, explored, and transcended—the rest of her life. Davis, meanwhile, found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense of political exile from racism at home and brought a sense of solidarity with Algerian independence. For her, Paris was a city of political commitment, activism, and militancy, qualities that would deeply inform her own revolutionary agenda and soon make her a hero to the French writers she had once studied.
Kaplan, whose own junior year abroad played a prominent role in her classic memoir, French Lessons, spins these three quite different stories into one evocative biography, brimming with the ferment and yearnings of youth and shot through with the knowledge of how a single year—and a magical city—can change a whole life. No one who has ever dreamed of Paris should miss it.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published January 26, 2006
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March 7, 2014
HOW TO BE LOST: SEX (RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER) IN THE CITY OF LIGHT: My March column at Bookslut
After graduating from college, I headed to Paris to study contemporary French philosophy -- Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze -- and semiotics with Julia Kristeva. I spent most evenings contemplating the meaning of life while drinking Scotch in a gay bar in the Marais. I lived in a series of chambres de bonne with a Turkish toilet down the hall and had a boyfriend in New York, a lover in Italy, and another in London, whose visits to me in the City of Love I expertly juggled. I believed I was following the tried and true path toward a life of an intellectual and sensual super-sophistiquée.
The odysseys of American writers and artists in Paris -- Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin et cetera -- are legendary. But what of the legions of young Americans, especially women, who, like Patricia Franchini (played by Jean Seberg) in Godard's film Breathless, came to Paris on study abroad programs ostensibly to attend classes at the Sorbonne, but who really were in search of a degree in the School of Life?
It seems there is a small but growing literature on the subject.
The most comprehensive study is historian Whitney Walton's Internationalism, National Identities and Study Abroad: France and the United States 1890-1970 (2010). This subgenre's pioneering narrative, however, is Elaine Dundy's classic autobiographical novel The Dud Avocado (1958), written the year before Breathless was made. It recounts the (mis)adventures of Sally Jay Gorce, middle-class, Midwesterner, and aspiring actress. Sally Jay occasionally goes to a lecture at the Sorbonne, chats with exchange students, and hangs out at Le Select in Montparnasse. Mostly, with her hair dyed pink and wearing her eclectic outfits, she explores Paris seeking new experiences. She goes to "lesbian joints," poses nude for an artist, nurses hangovers at the Ritz bar, and beds a wide range of men. Funny, charming, perceptive, surprising, a master of irony and understatement, Sally Jay is astonishingly real. Her year in Paris is an attempt to reconcile love, sex, career, and respect -- the eternal female conundrum. Wearily she concludes, "it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn't our century."
In 1961, Barnard graduate, Nancy K. Miller, now a renowned feminist scholar, left New York in search of intellectual and sexual freedom in Paris. A "real-life Dud Avocado," Miller's Breathless: An American Girl in Paris (2013) is an account of both her sexual awakening and her developing feminist consciousness. She begins her Parisian adventure by sleeping with a married doctor, a friend of her parents' charged with looking out for her. While studying French literature at the Sorbonne, she has a several affairs with hapless men. Second wave feminism still a decade away, Miller sees few options: she marries, disastrously, another American ex-patriot escaping his own "family plots."
"I had hoped that in marrying Jim," she writes, "and living with him in Paris, I would escape my nice-Jewish-girl destiny. I longed for glamour and style, Frenchness, Jean Seberg in Breathless, or Jeanne Moreau (even more of a reach) [...in...] Les Liaisons Dangereuses." Moving in with Jim, however, she "voluntarily preempted the task of washing his socks." Urged by her female friends to have children, she was told that by not having them she wasn't "delivering as a woman."
Miller's account resembles Mary McCarthy's The Group in its bold, frank descriptions of sex, contraception, and abortion, and her acerbic wit and uncommon insight. Her political awareness shifts and broadens while abroad. "From here the situation in Vietnam," she writes to her parents, "seems absolutely insane -- there's a feeling of wonder that American policy can be so blind to reality." Of the Kennedy assassination, she writes: "The French were mystified by how the protection of a president could be so inefficient. They immediately imagined a conspiracy theory."
An affair with a German worker redecorating her and Jim's new apartment leads Miller out of her bad marriage and back home. Miller's zestful, poignant memoir brilliantly evokes how it feels to be a young woman in Paris steeped in desire and confusion, seeking answers and clarity, yet sensing that a state of uncertainty and amazement may be the most thrilling of all.
During the period the French call "les trente glorieuses" (the thirty glorious years) -- the post-war recovery years from 1945 to 1975 -- three young women who would later be among the United States' most iconic public figures of the century, spent time studying in Paris: Jacqueline Bouvier, 1949-1950; Susan Sontag, 1957-1958; and Angela Davis, 1963-1964. Their experiences are chronicled in Alice Kaplan's extraordinary account Dreaming in French (2013). Kaplan, who explored her own junior year abroad in French Lessons (1994), considers three American women from different generations, cultures, and classes. Examining both commonalities and divergences in their Parisian experiences, she sheds fascinating new light on each woman's trajectory and reveals how these exploits significantly influenced them throughout their later lives.
When the twenty-year-old Catholic debutante Jacqueline Bouvier arrived in Paris on the Smith program, French women had been exercising their right to vote for five years and Simone de Beauvoir was about to publish the second volume of her seminal The Second Sex. Jackie's immediate interests, however, lay elsewhere. Her grandfather had insisted they were descended from French royalty; though the lie was eventually exposed, Jackie was intent on proving that if not of the French aristocracy, she could certainly run with them. Coming from a wealthy East Coast family, she had all the right introductions and was soon attending dinners and soirées with the Parisian elite, her weekends spent riding and hunting at their chateaux. She perfected her French. "I have two lives," she wrote to her stepbrother, "flying from here [the apartment she lived in with a French family] to the Sorbonne and Reid Hall, in a lovely, quiet, rainy world -- or, like the maid on her day out, putting on a fur coat and going to the middle of town and being swanky at the Ritz." A decade later, accompanying her husband on his first trip to France as president of the United States, Jacqueline Kennedy dismissed her interpreter so she could speak directly with de Gaulle. Later, as a book editor, she mostly published work connected to French culture or history.
Susan Sontag was more likely to hang out at the Deux Magots or Café de Flore in the Latin Quarter than at the Ritz. After college she had married Philip Rieff, had a baby, David, then left them to go live in Paris with her lover, Harriet Sohmers, who worked for the Herald Tribune. Sontag's crowd included Bernard Frechtman, Jean Genet's agent and translator; Allen Ginsberg; James Baldwin; and Cuban actress and playwright María Irene Fornés (also Sohmers's lover). Sontag received a fellowship from the American Association of University Women to study the metaphysical presuppositions of ethics at the Sorbonne. She read contemporary French literature voraciously, went to the theatre, and, above all, the cinema, often seeing several films a day. Then, as now, Paris was a cinephile's mecca offering movies from all genres and countries, at all hours.
Leaving Paris for New York, Sontag began to write for the New York Review of Books, primarily on French topics. In 1966 she published Against Interpretation, launching her career as "an apostle of the avant-garde." The essay collection, Kaplan writes, "might have been called 'On France': detailed analyses of a whole panoply of French writers and filmmakers and novelists." Sontag wrote about the likes of Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, bringing "French Theory" to America.
Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, Angela Davis, attended segregated schools and lived in a neighborhood nicknamed "Dynamite Hill" because of the incessant bombings by segregationists. To deal with the violent racism she experienced daily, she fantasized she wore a white mask that allowed her to "go unceremoniously into the theater or amusement park or wherever I wanted to go." After she'd had her fun she ripped off the mask, laughing at those she'd duped. Her mastery of French in high school and at Brandeis was an aspect of this mask. France held a mythical power for Black Americans as a place of freedom. James Baldwin had come to Brandeis to lecture in her freshman year. Paris was home to Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and Josephine Baker. Many black American soldiers remained in France after both world wars, finding the country more open and tolerant -- due more to the French mythologizing of black American culture than to the their being anti-racist. Actually, when Angela Davis first went to Paris in the summer of 1962, one of the first things she noticed was the ubiquitous racial slurs against Algerians. She joined the pro-Algerian demonstration on the Place de la Sorbonne, later described in her renowned An Autobiography (1974): "When the flics broke it up with their high power water hoses, they were as vicious as the redneck cops in Birmingham who met the Freedom Riders with their dogs and hoses."
Davis spent her junior year in Paris, the only black student of forty-six in the Hamilton program. Very familiar with the work of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Proust, Camus, and Sartre, she was one of six students advanced enough for an intensive course in contemporary literature at the Sorbonne. While she was in France, four Birmingham girls -- friends and neighbors of Davis's -- died when a bomb exploded in a Baptist Church, and Kennedy was assassinated.
In 1965, after graduating from Brandeis, she studied in Frankfurt with the social critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno, then worked on her PhD with the political theorist Herbert Marcuse at University of California, San Diego. Much of her reading during the years she was developing her own radical political philosophy was in French: Jean-Paul Sartre on colonialism and post-colonialism, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Henri Alleg on torture, Henri Lefebvre and Louis Althusser on Marxist theory, and Daniel Guérin on anarchism.
Later, when Davis was imprisoned for her alleged role in a California courtroom shooting, four hundred French intellectuals, including Daniel Guérin, Jacques Derrida, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes, signed a letter demanding her release. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Foucault, Louis Aragon, and Pablo Picasso wrote another letter of protest to Governor Ronald Reagan. In 1971, sixty thousand people marched in Paris for her liberation. Angela Davis's story, writes Kaplan, itself became mythic.
My own memories of my Paris years are rather hazy. Thirty years on, after reading these excellent books on the both familiar and very diverse experiences of young American women in Paris, I realize what I was really learning in the City of Light was how to be -- and stay -- lost: essential training for a writer and a woman.
After graduating from college, I headed to Paris to study contemporary French philosophy -- Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze -- and semiotics with Julia Kristeva. I spent most evenings contemplating the meaning of life while drinking Scotch in a gay bar in the Marais. I lived in a series of chambres de bonne with a Turkish toilet down the hall and had a boyfriend in New York, a lover in Italy, and another in London, whose visits to me in the City of Love I expertly juggled. I believed I was following the tried and true path toward a life of an intellectual and sensual super-sophistiquée.
The odysseys of American writers and artists in Paris -- Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin et cetera -- are legendary. But what of the legions of young Americans, especially women, who, like Patricia Franchini (played by Jean Seberg) in Godard's film Breathless, came to Paris on study abroad programs ostensibly to attend classes at the Sorbonne, but who really were in search of a degree in the School of Life?
It seems there is a small but growing literature on the subject.
The most comprehensive study is historian Whitney Walton's Internationalism, National Identities and Study Abroad: France and the United States 1890-1970 (2010). This subgenre's pioneering narrative, however, is Elaine Dundy's classic autobiographical novel The Dud Avocado (1958), written the year before Breathless was made. It recounts the (mis)adventures of Sally Jay Gorce, middle-class, Midwesterner, and aspiring actress. Sally Jay occasionally goes to a lecture at the Sorbonne, chats with exchange students, and hangs out at Le Select in Montparnasse. Mostly, with her hair dyed pink and wearing her eclectic outfits, she explores Paris seeking new experiences. She goes to "lesbian joints," poses nude for an artist, nurses hangovers at the Ritz bar, and beds a wide range of men. Funny, charming, perceptive, surprising, a master of irony and understatement, Sally Jay is astonishingly real. Her year in Paris is an attempt to reconcile love, sex, career, and respect -- the eternal female conundrum. Wearily she concludes, "it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn't our century."
In 1961, Barnard graduate, Nancy K. Miller, now a renowned feminist scholar, left New York in search of intellectual and sexual freedom in Paris. A "real-life Dud Avocado," Miller's Breathless: An American Girl in Paris (2013) is an account of both her sexual awakening and her developing feminist consciousness. She begins her Parisian adventure by sleeping with a married doctor, a friend of her parents' charged with looking out for her. While studying French literature at the Sorbonne, she has a several affairs with hapless men. Second wave feminism still a decade away, Miller sees few options: she marries, disastrously, another American ex-patriot escaping his own "family plots."
"I had hoped that in marrying Jim," she writes, "and living with him in Paris, I would escape my nice-Jewish-girl destiny. I longed for glamour and style, Frenchness, Jean Seberg in Breathless, or Jeanne Moreau (even more of a reach) [...in...] Les Liaisons Dangereuses." Moving in with Jim, however, she "voluntarily preempted the task of washing his socks." Urged by her female friends to have children, she was told that by not having them she wasn't "delivering as a woman."
Miller's account resembles Mary McCarthy's The Group in its bold, frank descriptions of sex, contraception, and abortion, and her acerbic wit and uncommon insight. Her political awareness shifts and broadens while abroad. "From here the situation in Vietnam," she writes to her parents, "seems absolutely insane -- there's a feeling of wonder that American policy can be so blind to reality." Of the Kennedy assassination, she writes: "The French were mystified by how the protection of a president could be so inefficient. They immediately imagined a conspiracy theory."
An affair with a German worker redecorating her and Jim's new apartment leads Miller out of her bad marriage and back home. Miller's zestful, poignant memoir brilliantly evokes how it feels to be a young woman in Paris steeped in desire and confusion, seeking answers and clarity, yet sensing that a state of uncertainty and amazement may be the most thrilling of all.
During the period the French call "les trente glorieuses" (the thirty glorious years) -- the post-war recovery years from 1945 to 1975 -- three young women who would later be among the United States' most iconic public figures of the century, spent time studying in Paris: Jacqueline Bouvier, 1949-1950; Susan Sontag, 1957-1958; and Angela Davis, 1963-1964. Their experiences are chronicled in Alice Kaplan's extraordinary account Dreaming in French (2013). Kaplan, who explored her own junior year abroad in French Lessons (1994), considers three American women from different generations, cultures, and classes. Examining both commonalities and divergences in their Parisian experiences, she sheds fascinating new light on each woman's trajectory and reveals how these exploits significantly influenced them throughout their later lives.
When the twenty-year-old Catholic debutante Jacqueline Bouvier arrived in Paris on the Smith program, French women had been exercising their right to vote for five years and Simone de Beauvoir was about to publish the second volume of her seminal The Second Sex. Jackie's immediate interests, however, lay elsewhere. Her grandfather had insisted they were descended from French royalty; though the lie was eventually exposed, Jackie was intent on proving that if not of the French aristocracy, she could certainly run with them. Coming from a wealthy East Coast family, she had all the right introductions and was soon attending dinners and soirées with the Parisian elite, her weekends spent riding and hunting at their chateaux. She perfected her French. "I have two lives," she wrote to her stepbrother, "flying from here [the apartment she lived in with a French family] to the Sorbonne and Reid Hall, in a lovely, quiet, rainy world -- or, like the maid on her day out, putting on a fur coat and going to the middle of town and being swanky at the Ritz." A decade later, accompanying her husband on his first trip to France as president of the United States, Jacqueline Kennedy dismissed her interpreter so she could speak directly with de Gaulle. Later, as a book editor, she mostly published work connected to French culture or history.
Susan Sontag was more likely to hang out at the Deux Magots or Café de Flore in the Latin Quarter than at the Ritz. After college she had married Philip Rieff, had a baby, David, then left them to go live in Paris with her lover, Harriet Sohmers, who worked for the Herald Tribune. Sontag's crowd included Bernard Frechtman, Jean Genet's agent and translator; Allen Ginsberg; James Baldwin; and Cuban actress and playwright María Irene Fornés (also Sohmers's lover). Sontag received a fellowship from the American Association of University Women to study the metaphysical presuppositions of ethics at the Sorbonne. She read contemporary French literature voraciously, went to the theatre, and, above all, the cinema, often seeing several films a day. Then, as now, Paris was a cinephile's mecca offering movies from all genres and countries, at all hours.
Leaving Paris for New York, Sontag began to write for the New York Review of Books, primarily on French topics. In 1966 she published Against Interpretation, launching her career as "an apostle of the avant-garde." The essay collection, Kaplan writes, "might have been called 'On France': detailed analyses of a whole panoply of French writers and filmmakers and novelists." Sontag wrote about the likes of Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, bringing "French Theory" to America.
Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, Angela Davis, attended segregated schools and lived in a neighborhood nicknamed "Dynamite Hill" because of the incessant bombings by segregationists. To deal with the violent racism she experienced daily, she fantasized she wore a white mask that allowed her to "go unceremoniously into the theater or amusement park or wherever I wanted to go." After she'd had her fun she ripped off the mask, laughing at those she'd duped. Her mastery of French in high school and at Brandeis was an aspect of this mask. France held a mythical power for Black Americans as a place of freedom. James Baldwin had come to Brandeis to lecture in her freshman year. Paris was home to Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and Josephine Baker. Many black American soldiers remained in France after both world wars, finding the country more open and tolerant -- due more to the French mythologizing of black American culture than to the their being anti-racist. Actually, when Angela Davis first went to Paris in the summer of 1962, one of the first things she noticed was the ubiquitous racial slurs against Algerians. She joined the pro-Algerian demonstration on the Place de la Sorbonne, later described in her renowned An Autobiography (1974): "When the flics broke it up with their high power water hoses, they were as vicious as the redneck cops in Birmingham who met the Freedom Riders with their dogs and hoses."
Davis spent her junior year in Paris, the only black student of forty-six in the Hamilton program. Very familiar with the work of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Proust, Camus, and Sartre, she was one of six students advanced enough for an intensive course in contemporary literature at the Sorbonne. While she was in France, four Birmingham girls -- friends and neighbors of Davis's -- died when a bomb exploded in a Baptist Church, and Kennedy was assassinated.
In 1965, after graduating from Brandeis, she studied in Frankfurt with the social critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno, then worked on her PhD with the political theorist Herbert Marcuse at University of California, San Diego. Much of her reading during the years she was developing her own radical political philosophy was in French: Jean-Paul Sartre on colonialism and post-colonialism, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Henri Alleg on torture, Henri Lefebvre and Louis Althusser on Marxist theory, and Daniel Guérin on anarchism.
Later, when Davis was imprisoned for her alleged role in a California courtroom shooting, four hundred French intellectuals, including Daniel Guérin, Jacques Derrida, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes, signed a letter demanding her release. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Foucault, Louis Aragon, and Pablo Picasso wrote another letter of protest to Governor Ronald Reagan. In 1971, sixty thousand people marched in Paris for her liberation. Angela Davis's story, writes Kaplan, itself became mythic.
My own memories of my Paris years are rather hazy. Thirty years on, after reading these excellent books on the both familiar and very diverse experiences of young American women in Paris, I realize what I was really learning in the City of Light was how to be -- and stay -- lost: essential training for a writer and a woman.
January 28, 2014
Was keeping this book until the moment I have to return it. But I still didn't go over the other two wonderful women's part. I think that is my narrowness, that's how scholar/ university learning narrows you down. I took this book as a reference book on Susan Sontag, so I was reading Susan Sontag's part closely, ignoring the other two.
But the Sontag part was very good, given the fact that this book is so well-structured, I mean, organized in a way, you want to read it systematically. It reveals a lot of deep insights upon Sontag's life in Paris, even her early life in Paris regarding to her marriage to Philip Rieff. It shows us how close Sontag was to the Europa's culture center, and how she was attached to Paris. It was a great idea of doing a book like this. Bravo.
But the Sontag part was very good, given the fact that this book is so well-structured, I mean, organized in a way, you want to read it systematically. It reveals a lot of deep insights upon Sontag's life in Paris, even her early life in Paris regarding to her marriage to Philip Rieff. It shows us how close Sontag was to the Europa's culture center, and how she was attached to Paris. It was a great idea of doing a book like this. Bravo.
October 20, 2020
If the other book I'm reading just now is a bit of bore, this one is even worse. Sorry, not meaning to offend anyone and definitely not the author who has done a very thorough job of researching into the minutest detail of Jacqueline Kennedy's life when she was studying in Paris in the 1950s, but there are endless notes and a what I would call very discreet way of describing an exhuberant young woman who went on to become one of if not the most popular First Lady ever. Surely she cannot have led such a tedious life in Paris before she married JFK....
June 8, 2012
I started out really liking this but my interest dropped off (terminally) as I tried to make sense out of the political controversy swirling around Angela Davis. It seemed to me that the thread holding the three stories together (the influence of study-abroad years in Paris) snapped. Maybe I should have soldiered on but I just didn't care anymore. C'est dommage!
July 16, 2023
جورنالیستکتر از اونی بود که فکر میکردم.
May 11, 2012
Being something of an amateur Francophile, I read this book on a whim, but then was pleasantly surprised to find it full of some unexpected personal historical references. The common thread for three otherwise diverse personalities, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, is the fact that they all spent around a year studying abroad in France during the formative years of their early adulthood. In 1962-63, I also spent year and a half of my early adulthood in France, not as a student, but as an enlisted soldier in the United States Army. Granted, I was not immersed in the daily study of the French language and culture as these amazing women were, but I was definitely influenced by French society through my somewhat limited contact. Alice Kaplan, the author, explains my circumstances quite clearly: "For some Americans, the early 1960s was an era of idealism and service, Vietnam a cloud on the horizon." I took President Kennedy's "Ask not what your country..." speech literally as a high school senior and enlisted in the Army in 1961, two weeks after graduating high school.
Each of this book's three subjects had their own specific reasons for studying in France, and of the three, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy was the only one with a definitive French ancestry. She studied there during the 1949-50 school year when I was in elementary school, was a debutante, and moved among the upper crust of post-war French society. Although her schooling in France had nothing to do with my personal history, her subsequent years as First Lady certainly did. She was a friend and admirer of Charles de Gaulle who ordered all American troops out of France when I was stationed there (my unit subsequently transferred to Germany). I didn't realize how much Jackie loved the French culture until I read this book and now wonder how much she would still be admired these days in the current American political climate.
I found the motives of Susan Sontag to be the most difficult of the three to understand and accept. As a prodigy she had attended several major universities in the United States (including UCLA, my alma mater) before studying in France in the late 50s. She was in her early twenties at the time, married, and had a child whom she basically abandoned to study in Paris, and her infatuation with an intense lesbian love affair dominated all else.
Angela Davis was teaching at UCLA when I was a student there, but my interests were in studying, not in following her concurrent controversies. I can, however, attest to the evils of the segregated South in 1961 while I was attending Signal School at Fort Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia. Upon arriving at the Augusta Airport from Los Angeles, I saw the "Whites Only" and "Colored Only" signs on the airport water fountains and bathrooms, quite a shock, even then, for a young man born and raised in California. A few weeks later a group of us student soldiers went to downtown Augusta on a weekend pass. One of the members of our small group was a black kid from Chicago, and someone suggested we go into a diner for a bite to eat; he refused, saying he was not allowed to go in there. This same kid who we had meals with in the mess hall every day was not allowed to eat with us outside the post. It still amazes me to this day that this existed in my own country.
Each of this book's three subjects had their own specific reasons for studying in France, and of the three, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy was the only one with a definitive French ancestry. She studied there during the 1949-50 school year when I was in elementary school, was a debutante, and moved among the upper crust of post-war French society. Although her schooling in France had nothing to do with my personal history, her subsequent years as First Lady certainly did. She was a friend and admirer of Charles de Gaulle who ordered all American troops out of France when I was stationed there (my unit subsequently transferred to Germany). I didn't realize how much Jackie loved the French culture until I read this book and now wonder how much she would still be admired these days in the current American political climate.
I found the motives of Susan Sontag to be the most difficult of the three to understand and accept. As a prodigy she had attended several major universities in the United States (including UCLA, my alma mater) before studying in France in the late 50s. She was in her early twenties at the time, married, and had a child whom she basically abandoned to study in Paris, and her infatuation with an intense lesbian love affair dominated all else.
Angela Davis was teaching at UCLA when I was a student there, but my interests were in studying, not in following her concurrent controversies. I can, however, attest to the evils of the segregated South in 1961 while I was attending Signal School at Fort Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia. Upon arriving at the Augusta Airport from Los Angeles, I saw the "Whites Only" and "Colored Only" signs on the airport water fountains and bathrooms, quite a shock, even then, for a young man born and raised in California. A few weeks later a group of us student soldiers went to downtown Augusta on a weekend pass. One of the members of our small group was a black kid from Chicago, and someone suggested we go into a diner for a bite to eat; he refused, saying he was not allowed to go in there. This same kid who we had meals with in the mess hall every day was not allowed to eat with us outside the post. It still amazes me to this day that this existed in my own country.
June 4, 2012
Though on the surface they don’t have a lot in common, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis have each been at the forefront of cultural revolutions in style, art, intellect and/or politics. They also each spent a student year in France, and in this absorbing and well researched book Alice Kaplan explores how their lives and work were enriched by their continuing sense of connection with that country. Besides offering unique insights into the backgrounds and accomplishments of three influential women, Dreaming in French also sketches the history of France, especially Paris, during their student abroad experiences, from the still under rationing post-war years of the 1950s to the post-colonial strife of the early 1960s. The portraits of all three women are fascinating, but most riveting for me were the sections on Angela Davis, a remarkable and intelligent woman by any standard. In spite of coming of age at a time when she featured prominently in the news, I found I had known very little about her.
July 24, 2020
Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis. Three very bright young women who shaped by time spent studying in Paris. By the end of the 1970's they would be iconic figures in the chaotic storm that is American culture. Not only would Paris shape them as students, later on in adulthood they would return to the city of lights. In all three cases, as very famous women. I really enjoyed this book because I gained insight into what Paris means personally and how it goes with you even after you have returned home.
July 9, 2020
Outstanding. In-depth without being overly academic. Fascinating parallels. I was particularly interested in the life of Angela Davis and this book gives an insight beyond the icon. True for JBK as well.
March 29, 2013
3 interesting women, one very boring book
February 11, 2024
Learned Too Late
I was too young in the 60's and 70's to notice, much less understand the racial, cultural and political climate. In my teens and twenties l was looking ahead and wasn't interested in past history. I'm grateful for the analysis presented by the author. It has spiked my curiosity and deepened my resolve to read and learn more.
I was too young in the 60's and 70's to notice, much less understand the racial, cultural and political climate. In my teens and twenties l was looking ahead and wasn't interested in past history. I'm grateful for the analysis presented by the author. It has spiked my curiosity and deepened my resolve to read and learn more.
September 27, 2021
ct super long à lire peut-être parce que c un peu "intellectuel"
January 13, 2023
This is an in-depth study of three women whose coming of age defines the times in which I grew from adolescence to womanhood. The second wave of feminism. And how little we know about them. pg 228, Kaplan says of Bouvier "overlooked", of Sontag "glossed over", of Davis "unnoticed".
April 12, 2017
In this work of non-fiction, Alice Kaplan details the lives of three disparate American women, who all had one key detail in common - each spent a year abroad in Paris, a period of their lives which deeply shaped each of them. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis were three profoundly different women and each visited Paris in different decades between the 1940s and 60s, but each returned to their home country shaped by their experiences abroad. This work is a "triptych of three young women's cultural, academic, and social lives in Paris, and a study of influence in several directions" (2).
In some ways, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy was the most dissimilar from the other two women detailed in this book. She travelled to Paris as part of a study abroad program in the 40s and, unlike the other women, had relatively plush accommodations with a well to do host family and enjoyed high brow social events throughout her stay. Unlike the other two women, she was not a writer and little insight into her thoughts or feelings on her time abroad are known. Her section of the book comes across as if from a vast distance; the author analyzing the glamorous First Lady from a great remove. Kaplan and her readers are yet more spectators of the icon that is Jackie. Indeed, much of the influence of her time in France is credited to her love for French fashion, design, and reading French authors and the negative feedback she received for bringing this French influence into the White House.
Susan Sontag, unlike the other two women, traveled to Paris after marriage and the birth of her son, and did so without an affiliation with a study abroad program. The influence of her time in Paris is keenly felt in her later writing. Susan seemed trapped between two worlds: "The American literary establishment called attention to her by finding her literature impossibly French; the French literary establishment insisted she wrote like an American" (122).
Angela Davis, who was the last of the three to visit Paris, did so in the same means as Jackie: as an accomplished French student as part of a study abroad program. As an African American, France offered the opportunity to "take off the mask" of racial identity (155). Years later, Angela became closely tied with the Black Panther Party and yet maintained massive support from France, as she was seen as a student and product of French thinking. For France, Angela was seen thus: "an African American girl studying in France acquires revolutionary wisdom from the decolonization struggles and returns home to challenge the powers that be and triumph over her enemies" (221).
I had varying levels of interest in each of the women detailed in this book, but I did appreciate the analytical rather than strictly biographical take that the author provides. Additionally, I found the organization of this book helped facilitate focus on the influence of Paris for each woman. For each woman, there is a chapter detailing their time in Paris, followed by a chapter about their return that demonstrates how their time abroad shaped their lives in the following years.
Although in many ways the three women detailed in this book seem to have little in common, it was interesting to consider the influence of spending time in another county and immersed in another language has on individuals. Kaplan argues that "France gave each of these women a deep and lasting confidence, confirmed their spirit of adventure, and guaranteed their freedom from home constraints" (223). Of course, it could be argued that each of these women were already poised for the prominent roles they would one day hold, but it is also undeniable that Paris helped shape them and contributed to their stories.
In some ways, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy was the most dissimilar from the other two women detailed in this book. She travelled to Paris as part of a study abroad program in the 40s and, unlike the other women, had relatively plush accommodations with a well to do host family and enjoyed high brow social events throughout her stay. Unlike the other two women, she was not a writer and little insight into her thoughts or feelings on her time abroad are known. Her section of the book comes across as if from a vast distance; the author analyzing the glamorous First Lady from a great remove. Kaplan and her readers are yet more spectators of the icon that is Jackie. Indeed, much of the influence of her time in France is credited to her love for French fashion, design, and reading French authors and the negative feedback she received for bringing this French influence into the White House.
Susan Sontag, unlike the other two women, traveled to Paris after marriage and the birth of her son, and did so without an affiliation with a study abroad program. The influence of her time in Paris is keenly felt in her later writing. Susan seemed trapped between two worlds: "The American literary establishment called attention to her by finding her literature impossibly French; the French literary establishment insisted she wrote like an American" (122).
Angela Davis, who was the last of the three to visit Paris, did so in the same means as Jackie: as an accomplished French student as part of a study abroad program. As an African American, France offered the opportunity to "take off the mask" of racial identity (155). Years later, Angela became closely tied with the Black Panther Party and yet maintained massive support from France, as she was seen as a student and product of French thinking. For France, Angela was seen thus: "an African American girl studying in France acquires revolutionary wisdom from the decolonization struggles and returns home to challenge the powers that be and triumph over her enemies" (221).
I had varying levels of interest in each of the women detailed in this book, but I did appreciate the analytical rather than strictly biographical take that the author provides. Additionally, I found the organization of this book helped facilitate focus on the influence of Paris for each woman. For each woman, there is a chapter detailing their time in Paris, followed by a chapter about their return that demonstrates how their time abroad shaped their lives in the following years.
Although in many ways the three women detailed in this book seem to have little in common, it was interesting to consider the influence of spending time in another county and immersed in another language has on individuals. Kaplan argues that "France gave each of these women a deep and lasting confidence, confirmed their spirit of adventure, and guaranteed their freedom from home constraints" (223). Of course, it could be argued that each of these women were already poised for the prominent roles they would one day hold, but it is also undeniable that Paris helped shape them and contributed to their stories.
August 25, 2012
The title drew me in. My mom used to theorize that young girls fell in love with French or horses - she and I seem to have been horse people, my sister a French person - and that memory was enough to pick up the book and take a look. I know who all the women of this book are, but none of them had ever been of particular interest. They all fit into different segments of the various Histories encountered in school. What made this book intriguing was linking them through their common experience of France. I enjoyed most the stories of Kennedy and Davis; Sontag was a bit unnerving.
I suspect I imagine France as it was in the late 40s and early 50s - when Julia Child was hanging out there - and so the descriptions of Jacqueline's experiences were most...endearing? Familiar? Kennedy is a sympathetic figure - sort of this distant princess that no one really knows, but who everyone feels the need to care for - and that probably helped too. I liked the idea of the rebirth of a country - of the rebuilding of France - that was woven into her experience of France. The impression left by the book was that she loved France very much, but had to be American enough to satisfy Americans, and that she managed to balance this without giving up herself.
Sontag was not nearly as sympathetic. The author's description of Sontag leaving her child behind is fairly gentle, but horrified me, nonetheless. Perhaps because we are guilty of similar abandonment, if only in our thoughts. I was sad that she was born in a time when homosexuality was so taboo that she felt she had to escape. There is a description of her showing up in court in lipstick and a skirt that provides insight into that world. The judge saw her appearance as proof that she was not a lesbian. A long way to go still, of course, but a great deal has changed.
The book supports the idea that living and studying abroad provides students with a view of the United States through the eyes of a different nation. Davis saw America through the lens of the France that had embraced and accepted African American soldiers, writers, musicians and artists for decades. She arrived just before the Birmingham church bombing, and in French papers it was reported in detail, it was okay to suggest that a white person was suspected, and her own horror at the event was shared on the printed page. Davis also saw a very different France from the one that so many African Americans had found liberating and accepting. She witnessed the same violence against Algerians that she had seen in Birmingham. My impression of Davis was that of a very different kind of distant figure from Kennedy - she doesn't need anyone to take care of her. What I enjoyed most about Davis' story were the descriptions of what she was reading and thinking about - Proust, especially.
Throughout the book, there are new ways of looking at what it means to be an American, and how that meaning has changed through the three generations of these women. There are also great descriptions of the ideas of French philosophers. A good, enjoyable book to read and think about.
I suspect I imagine France as it was in the late 40s and early 50s - when Julia Child was hanging out there - and so the descriptions of Jacqueline's experiences were most...endearing? Familiar? Kennedy is a sympathetic figure - sort of this distant princess that no one really knows, but who everyone feels the need to care for - and that probably helped too. I liked the idea of the rebirth of a country - of the rebuilding of France - that was woven into her experience of France. The impression left by the book was that she loved France very much, but had to be American enough to satisfy Americans, and that she managed to balance this without giving up herself.
Sontag was not nearly as sympathetic. The author's description of Sontag leaving her child behind is fairly gentle, but horrified me, nonetheless. Perhaps because we are guilty of similar abandonment, if only in our thoughts. I was sad that she was born in a time when homosexuality was so taboo that she felt she had to escape. There is a description of her showing up in court in lipstick and a skirt that provides insight into that world. The judge saw her appearance as proof that she was not a lesbian. A long way to go still, of course, but a great deal has changed.
The book supports the idea that living and studying abroad provides students with a view of the United States through the eyes of a different nation. Davis saw America through the lens of the France that had embraced and accepted African American soldiers, writers, musicians and artists for decades. She arrived just before the Birmingham church bombing, and in French papers it was reported in detail, it was okay to suggest that a white person was suspected, and her own horror at the event was shared on the printed page. Davis also saw a very different France from the one that so many African Americans had found liberating and accepting. She witnessed the same violence against Algerians that she had seen in Birmingham. My impression of Davis was that of a very different kind of distant figure from Kennedy - she doesn't need anyone to take care of her. What I enjoyed most about Davis' story were the descriptions of what she was reading and thinking about - Proust, especially.
Throughout the book, there are new ways of looking at what it means to be an American, and how that meaning has changed through the three generations of these women. There are also great descriptions of the ideas of French philosophers. A good, enjoyable book to read and think about.
June 26, 2012
"Jacqueline Bouvier arrived with her upper-class connections; Susan Sontag, the self-invented European, with her opinions; Angela Davis, with her sense of justice and her fearlessness. They were in their twenties, reaching that existentential threshold where you start to see what you can do with what you've been given. France was the place where they could become themselves, or protect themselves from what they didn't want to become, as products of their families, their societies. Their Parisian years offer a glimpse of Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis before they became public figures. Were they always extraordinary young women of whom the greatest things were expected, or has fame distorted the stories of their youth? It is touching to imagine them before their images were frozen in the public mind, before they learned to pose or avoid photographers, when they still had the luxury of being students, though not exactly ordinary students." Intro, pg. 4
I loved this book because....just because. The portrayl of college students studying abroad, specifically in France, was one that I found to be well-rounded and fascinating. The author kept the book entertaining while still providing loads of information (well new-to-me information). At times it read like historical fiction, and I mean that in the best way possible. It was not just about these three intriguing women but also the time periods in which they lived, life in France and in America.
I walked away from this book with a tiny bit more knowledge about Susan Sontag but I still don't understand why she's famous. The Angela Davis chapters were very dry and the most disappointing, they were less about her time in France and more about life post-France. But even the post-France bits left my mind swirling with questions (aka her relationship with George Jackson WTF??).
I loved this book because....just because. The portrayl of college students studying abroad, specifically in France, was one that I found to be well-rounded and fascinating. The author kept the book entertaining while still providing loads of information (well new-to-me information). At times it read like historical fiction, and I mean that in the best way possible. It was not just about these three intriguing women but also the time periods in which they lived, life in France and in America.
I walked away from this book with a tiny bit more knowledge about Susan Sontag but I still don't understand why she's famous. The Angela Davis chapters were very dry and the most disappointing, they were less about her time in France and more about life post-France. But even the post-France bits left my mind swirling with questions (aka her relationship with George Jackson WTF??).
May 18, 2012
I attended a book reading by the author recently and it was amazing to learn of the number of people Ms. Kaplan tracked down and talked to while writing the book. She made a conscious decision not to contact Angela Davis, but to focus on her as she did the others - by talking to friends and associates and delving into their libraries.
I was surprised that the author actually had new things to say about Jackie that the general public doesn't already know.
Susan Sontag was somewhat of a mystery to me when I read the book. I can now understand why Paris was a magic place for her where she could feel free of American puritanical constraints.
Angela was my favorite subject in the book. I was just out of high school and trying to figure out a way to get to France to study for a year when Angela Davis was on trial. I have to admit that I was not interested in her politics at the time and did not realize how she became involved in prison rights. Her facility with the language of French makes me envious. Understanding the politics of France during her time there brought to a new meaning to emancipation to me.
I finally did study in France in 1973. It was a transformative year for me. I applaud Ms. Kaplan's ability to capture the essence or what it meant to her three subjects to spend a year away from America. I wonder if the experience is nearly the same for young people today who are able to have immediate access to friends and family while abroad.
A fascinating read.
I was surprised that the author actually had new things to say about Jackie that the general public doesn't already know.
Susan Sontag was somewhat of a mystery to me when I read the book. I can now understand why Paris was a magic place for her where she could feel free of American puritanical constraints.
Angela was my favorite subject in the book. I was just out of high school and trying to figure out a way to get to France to study for a year when Angela Davis was on trial. I have to admit that I was not interested in her politics at the time and did not realize how she became involved in prison rights. Her facility with the language of French makes me envious. Understanding the politics of France during her time there brought to a new meaning to emancipation to me.
I finally did study in France in 1973. It was a transformative year for me. I applaud Ms. Kaplan's ability to capture the essence or what it meant to her three subjects to spend a year away from America. I wonder if the experience is nearly the same for young people today who are able to have immediate access to friends and family while abroad.
A fascinating read.
May 19, 2012
Dreaming in French needs a different title. Yes, each of these women studied in Paris, and were influenced by French culture, but the focus is not really Paris, nor France. It is a worthwhile read, but a bit disjointed in its delivery and theory.
I must admit, I skimmed the Kennedy section. I've never been terribly intrigued by Camelot, ergo, JBK life was not a focus. What I did learn about Kennedy via the Sontag section was that she was far more the intellectual than one would assume. I now wonder if she wasn't yet another First Lady who advised behind closed doors.
Susan Sontag's entry was rather sterile. I think I've read too much about her lately. Her section in this book seemed to reinforce that she was an acquired taste.
Angela Davis's section reads like a mini biography. I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't know much of her backstory, however, after reading Kaplan's fine overview, Davis's autobiography is on my list (among other things).
If you are interested in the literary/political culture of France during the 50s-70s, this will be an interesting book. If you are curious about French intellectuals who influenced these women, this book will offer insight.
If you're expecting a deep immersion into Parisian culture, where you can almost taste the wine...this isn't your book.
I must admit, I skimmed the Kennedy section. I've never been terribly intrigued by Camelot, ergo, JBK life was not a focus. What I did learn about Kennedy via the Sontag section was that she was far more the intellectual than one would assume. I now wonder if she wasn't yet another First Lady who advised behind closed doors.
Susan Sontag's entry was rather sterile. I think I've read too much about her lately. Her section in this book seemed to reinforce that she was an acquired taste.
Angela Davis's section reads like a mini biography. I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't know much of her backstory, however, after reading Kaplan's fine overview, Davis's autobiography is on my list (among other things).
If you are interested in the literary/political culture of France during the 50s-70s, this will be an interesting book. If you are curious about French intellectuals who influenced these women, this book will offer insight.
If you're expecting a deep immersion into Parisian culture, where you can almost taste the wine...this isn't your book.
February 16, 2013
I borrowed this from the local library, but I will need to buy a copy, because I need to mark it up and make notes throughout. The book is well researched and well written, and goes into great depth and breadth for such a short book. I intend to use my copy when I buy it as a sort of bibliography to work through on 20th century Franco-American intellectual history. I read this concurrently with Fenby's biography of de Gaulle, "The General," the events of which overlap with "Dreaming in French." This was accidental, but I found that the two books work well together, providing different perspectives on the Algerian War, the Franco-American relationship, and 20th century French politics. Highly recommended.
April 29, 2012
3.5 stars. The section on Jackie O was really enjoyable because it was more biographical--this is what she did, this is where she went (and yes, I admit I liked the "this is what she wore"). Susan Sontag and Angela Davis are fascinating characters, but their sections were so much drier and less chatty, I almost felt like I was reading an academic text at times. I love the idea of this book, taking three wildly interesting and divergent people, with this one thing in common (and "a year in Paris" is certainly a rich and interesting and picturesque thing to read about), and picking up the thread of this thing throughout their lives. I do wish this had been slightly more lightweight and frothy, and yes, I do realize this makes me sound like an idiot.
September 22, 2012
This book wasn't as good as I thought it would be. I didn't really expect to like Sontag or Davis & I didn't. I liked the part about Jackie Kennedy the best. But the part about Angela Davis was interesting. I remember how sensational her case was when I was a young girl, but I was too young to remember the details, so that was interesting to learn about. The author did a good job of showing how each young woman's time in France impacted her life and her impact on others. But I guess I expected the author to relate the 3 young women to each other a little more, either in showing how different they were and why or showing some surprising commonalities between them. I really didn't get much of that.
March 2, 2017
Dreaming in French was about each of the three featured women's year abroad in Paris while students, and how that influenced their later lives. While this may be of interest to Francophiles, it didn't really grab me, except somewhat on the section about Angela Davis. The narrative overall was often bogged down in excessive detail about people other than the three featured women. On each of the three, there are more complete biographies available that would better reward the reader's time spent.
July 14, 2019
This a marvel of a book. It covers the influence of the time spent in France by Jacquelyn Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis. It covers three different times in contemporary history. It sets them in the framework of there own history set within the contemporary history of the time. Each one was of a different socio-economic group and were affected by the influence of living for a time in France in different and alike ways. This is a fascinating story of three amazing women who appeared on our screen for a short time and we are all the better for it.
April 22, 2013
I really wanted to love this book because it combined many elements I enjoy reading about. Though I admit the Jackie Bouvier and Angela Davis sections where exciting, the Susan Sontag section lagged. And honestly, I had a hard time finding connections with these three women. Yes, all three of them were a part of Parisian study abroad programs and became luminaries in American life...but it just didn't do it for me.
August 20, 2017
I started this book because I wanted to read about Jackie Kennedy in Paris. I recognized a lot of the places talked about and learned more about this amazing woman that the world refers to as "Jackie." However, the person I really learned the most about was Angela Davis. I only knew her according to what I read about her in the newspapers. She has quite a story and I would recommend this book just to find out more about her.
September 1, 2012
I absolutely loved reading this! The Jackie part was kinda blah, but the Susan Sontag and Angela Davis sections were fascinating. I loved how Alice Kaplan weaved three seemingly unrelated stories together and showed how these women's lives were connected to each other and to a city so many people love.
May 8, 2012
I can't recommend this one. It's terribly dry and, despite the academic tone, it lacks heft; there are a lot of beautifully articulated sentences, but they remind me of a lot of sentences I wrote in college essays -- finely crafted bullsh*t, but bullsh*t all the same.
August 1, 2013
Love love love this idea but the reality is a little less convincing.
January 25, 2017
angela davis chapter particularly was soo good.
July 3, 2024
Susan Sontag was reborn with the understanding that the life of the mind didn't have to exclude sensual pleasures. _Nightwood_ is the "unrealistic" lesbian cult classic that takes place in far-flung locales, but especially the Place Saint Sulpice, where Georges Perec conducted "An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris." In October 1974, he sat in three different cares on the Placea nd recorded what he saw and heard: pigeons, numbered buses, church bells, women with grocery b ags, the most banal signs and signals imaginable" (86).
Sontag on leaving her son David behind in the US: "The separation from her husband was bold enough. More radical as the fact that she had left her son behind. What she wrote about him (which has appeared with the publication o fher diaries by teh adult David Rieff) is heartbreaking:
"I hardly ever dream of David, and don't think of him much. He has made few inroads on my fantasy life. When I am with him, I adore him completely and without ambivalence. When I go away, as long as I know he's well takne-care-of, he dwindles very quickly. O fall the people I have loved, he's least of a ll a mental object of love, most intensely real." (100).
What strikes me now, rereading this - why did Kaplan feel compelled to call this "heartbreaking"? Is she, too, judging Sontag by the standards of mothers and not fathers?
Sontag explained to herself the valence of various phrases: "Je l'aime beaucoup is MORE thant 'Je l'aime bien' but LESS than Je l'aimen." s'eprendre de = fall in love with, Il n'est pas mal = he's nice. (102).
Sontag on leaving her son David behind in the US: "The separation from her husband was bold enough. More radical as the fact that she had left her son behind. What she wrote about him (which has appeared with the publication o fher diaries by teh adult David Rieff) is heartbreaking:
"I hardly ever dream of David, and don't think of him much. He has made few inroads on my fantasy life. When I am with him, I adore him completely and without ambivalence. When I go away, as long as I know he's well takne-care-of, he dwindles very quickly. O fall the people I have loved, he's least of a ll a mental object of love, most intensely real." (100).
What strikes me now, rereading this - why did Kaplan feel compelled to call this "heartbreaking"? Is she, too, judging Sontag by the standards of mothers and not fathers?
Sontag explained to herself the valence of various phrases: "Je l'aime beaucoup is MORE thant 'Je l'aime bien' but LESS than Je l'aimen." s'eprendre de = fall in love with, Il n'est pas mal = he's nice. (102).
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