In Woody Allen’s 2011 movie Midnight in Paris, Gil, a young Hollywood screenwriter and aspiring novelist, played by Owen Wilson, is transported back to the 1920s Paris. Every night, he meets his heroes, Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein. He encounters a cast of artists like Picasso, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dáli, Man Ray. Soon, his only source of happiness is to travel back to this period, which, still today, carries this aura of creativity, freedom, and sophisticated partying. But what was it really like for American writers to live in Paris in the 1920s? Why did they feel the need to flee the United States? What were they searching for in France’s capital? And what can they teach us, today, about the deep connections between American and French culture? To help us navigate the “Années Folles” in Paris, we are excited to welcome Antoine Guibal.
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Antoine Guibal is Assistant Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Languages and Cultures at École polytechnique in Paris. He completed his PhD on Stendhal at the University of Virginia in 2017. His book Stendhal biographe was published in 2020. His fields of research include French Romantic literature, biography, and autobiography. He is also very much interested in the American literature of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the works of expatriate writers living in Paris. In the Fall of 2024, he taught a course entitled “Writing the Expatriation: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s” in the French Department at Columbia University.
Credits
Host: Dr. Emmanuel Kattan
Editor and Producer: Rachel Kahn
Producer: Georgia O’Neil