Americans in Paris

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There is perhaps something perverse in returning to Paris in a moment of transnational studies that has aimed to diminish the metropolitan center’s hold on critical attention. Yet the case of Americans in Paris in particular offers insight into the gravitational interactions between empires . . .

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Belatedness, Artlessness and American Culture in fin-de-siècle France
By
Emily C. Burns
What emerges when we look beyond the often self-assured cosmopolitan circulation of Americans abroad such as Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler, is a larger identity construction that frequently performed cultural innocence. American artists, writers, and travelers sought to turn the liability of lacking a culture and tradition into the asset of allowing for unencumbered experience and being unaffected by the weight of history. In turn, notions of cultural innocence and belatedness that appear in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Franco-American exchange have resonances into the twentieth century, and even into the contemporary moment.
Replotting the Romance of Paris: Americans and the Commune
By
J. Michelle Coghlan
The tenacity of the Commune's second life does not simply attest to its continuing usefulness in American culture for making sense of revolutions past and future: it also crucially reverses the assumption that transnational circuits of memory—that memory without borders, as it were—are uniquely or definitively a product of our own hyper-mediated historical moment.
Langston Hughes and the Paris Transfer
By
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
"As the scholarly work of recovery and re-envisioning the American expatriate narrative continues to take shape and form, what Langston Hughes’s wonderment via his wanderings offers is a critical archive for the recuperation of another expatriate 'lost generation' that was neither white or male." Here, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting recovers Hughes's time in Paris alongside three African-American women: Ada "Bricktop" Smith, Florence Embry Jones, and Adelaide Hall. 
La postface au Serment du Jeu de Paume de John Ashbery
By
Olivier Brossard
Ce qui est remarquable dans la traduction anglaise du Serment [du Jeu de Paume] c'est que l'organe physique, la paume, disparaît en anglais au profit du geste, du mouvement à venir, de la balle qu'il va falloir attraper, peu après que l'on s'entend dire « tenetz ! » [voir tennis]. J'ai envie de lire dans cette traduction le passage à une poétique du geste dans le livre de John Ashbery : il ne s'agit pas de garder la balle, mais de faire le bon mouvement pour l'attraper et la renvoyer.

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