Paris: A Literary Adventure
Choose one:
Six Fridays, February 3 – March 16, 1-3 p.m.
Meets at Politics & Prose
(NOTE: The class will not meet on March 2)
OR
Six Tuesdays, January 31 - March 13, 7-9 p.m.
Meets at Jake's American Grille, 5018 Connnecticut Ave, NW
Food and drink will be available to order.
(NOTE: The class will not meet on February 14)
Price: $130 ($110 members)
Books:
Paris Was Ours, edited by Penelope Rowlands
Satori in Paris, Jack Kerouac
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, 1964 edition
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
Le Divorce, Diane Johnson
Paris: A Literary Adventure offers an eclectic peek at the rich vein of English language literature written in or about Paris. We will begin by reading Paris Was Ours, a collection of essays by a variety of wonderful writers. Our journey will continue with an unlikely “patron saint” of travel, Jack Kerouac, with his relatively unknown work Satori in Paris. From there we will jump back in time to the Paris of “the lost generation” (and will learn the surprising source of that label), reading Hemingway’s classic memoir A Moveable Feast and Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. We will round out our journey with a fascinating look into the lives of the working poor in Paris of the 1920s through the eyes of George Orwell, with his classic work Down and Out in Paris and London, and will return to the present with Le Divorce, a delightful comedy of manners that sheds light on Franco/American cultural differences through the adventures and misadventures of Isabel Walker, a young American in Paris.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor, teacher, and writing coach. She has created and taught literature courses in Paris, Florence, Hawaii and Cuba for Queens College, CUNY, and Writing from the Heart workshops in Essoyes, a village in the Champagne region of France.
