In this course, we will explore this fascinating work in two ways. In fact, we might say that a significant part of the work that takes place in social movements, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOS), legislative bodies, and other key organizations is rhetorical work, work designed to compel the recognition of human dignity and rights through the power of persuasive speech. It is difficult to imagine a situation where words matter more than in the advocacy, activism, law, and policy-work that seeks to secure and protect the rights of our human community. Major assignments will include two exams and a multimodal project. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, though we will certainly add selections by others. We will read fiction, non-fiction, and poetry produced by writers like T. Our work will deepen our understanding of what literary scholar Donald Pizer calls the “Paris moment” specifically and Modernism generally and will allow us to draw connections with our own historical and cultural moment. We will not limit ourselves to works by American writers but will also consider those of writers from other English-speaking countries as well as performing artists. In this course, we will explore texts by writers who made up the artistically fertile early-twentieth-century expatriate community in Paris. And in that search, they find each other.

At once pithy and enigmatic, Stein’s observation provides a way for these artists to self-identify and to explain what they are seeking-in their work and in Paris.

But when Stein says it, she does so with an eye toward the young, mostly American writers and artists who populate her Paris salon. Indeed, in his posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recounts that Stein overheard a French garage owner use the phrase with exasperation as he berated a mechanic. The idea of a lost generation may not have been new in 1926, however. He credits the comment to his literary mentor, the iconoclastic American writer Gertrude Stein. This is the epigraph from Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. Extended Title: Modernist Expatriates in Early-Twentieth-Century Paris

A moveable feast sparknotes