The Beach Effect

2018-2019 Romance Studies Dialogue Series, with Hannah Freed-Thall, Assistant Professor of French Literature, Thought, and Culture at NYU

Modernism's love of the city is well established. This talk investigates the seashore as a generative site for twentieth-century thought. Artists, authors, scientists, and filmmakers from Marcel Proust to Severo Sarduy and from Rachel Carson to Agnès Varda imagine this protean edge variously: as a hunting ground, a zone of sensory exposure, a sociological laboratory, a queer refuge, and-above all-as a theater of impermanence.