French Studies 667 - Twentieth-Century Poetry I

Taught in French. An exploration of interactions between twentieth-century French poetry and the visual arts, with emphasis on the first half of the century. Topics include calligrams; the connections between art and poetry in works by Apollinaire, Reverdy, Cendrars, and Desnos; the illustrated book, in which poems are accompanied by artists' renditions or in which artists' drawings are then "illustrated" by poems; the representation of objects in Breton and Ponge; Eluard's poems describing painters; and the ekphrastic poetry of Michaux and Heather Dohollau.