From the Professor
I have been teaching Parisian Views for nearly a decade at Yeshiva College. Inspired by a book on nineteenth-century French photography by Shelley Rice, this interdisciplinary Humanities course explores the ways in which French writers and artists found new ways of seeing the world as their city transformed over the course of the nineteenth century.
In the beginning of the Spring 2020 semester, I jokingly told my current crop of students that the class would be like a cult. What I meant was that as we explore texts and works of art, I would ask them to look at New York City in a different way. Over our weeks together, they would begin to recognize—as did artists like Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Caillebotte, and writers like Baudelaire, Balzac, and Zola—the beauty of everyday life. Suddenly the smallest encounters would become worthy of meditative reflection, the most mundane objects, well, objets d’art. I suggested that they, too, would be changed in ways that only their classmates would fully understand.
This semester started like countless others: with students posting on the class Instagram account, heading into subways to consider the crowds, trekking to the Met to observe Impressionist paintings. But then, Covid-19 hit. Plans for further excursions were halted. Baudelaire’s once charming notion of entering a crowd to “take a bath of multitude” now filled us with dread. There would be no final trip to the High Line Park to explore new ways of looking at our own city spaces.
But the cult had already taken hold, and these students had a set of tools that served them well. They continued to take pictures of their surroundings, as they reflected on the dramatic shifts in our relationship to urban spaces. Their earlier work had quickly become a time capsule of a distant way of life: Instagram postings of vibrant city and campus spaces and a set of reflective “Metro Journals” from the first half of the semester.
As you explore this website filled with their images—some from before Corona, some from after—we hope that you’ll begin to see differently as well. After all, there’s no better time than social isolation to learn to become a poet of everyday life.
Professor of French & English
Chair, Yeshiva College English Department
