Fashions for Genius and the Flâneur: A Guide to Paris

Abstract

Paris in the 1920s has largely come to epitomise a particular conception of High Modernism, or the consolidation and extension of some of the key cultural and aesthetic ideas and practices of the early twentieth-century modernist avant-garde. From the Dada festival in Paris, to the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, to Natalie Barney’s rue Jacob salon, postwar Paris becomes the space across which memoirs, autobiographies, newspaper articles and academic treatises inscribe a particular version of modernism that highlights the expatriate, urban experience. As a site of strategic articulations, Paris is a useful focus for a consideration of the relationship between certain social and ideological tendencies and the contingent practices and contiguities of post-war modernism. As both a geographical location and a discursive construct, it is through using ‘Paris’ that this chapter will read across the texts and contexts in which Barnes, Loy and Stein engage with key (modernist) ideas of genius and the city.