S0705 Discovering the Mediterranean: Tourism and Literature in the 20th Century

In the first decades of the XXth. Century a number of artists (mostly writers and painters) choose the Mediterranean as a place to work. Some of them came from the northern regions of Europe, others came from Mediterranean countries, but mostly from big cities: all searched light and sun but also old forms of life endagered by growing urbanism and industrialization.
At the same time, a new industry was on the rise: tourism, that showed people in towns the possibility to rest far from the stressing urban life. In their quest for primitivism, those artists made popular these same places they pretended to preserve.
This course will focus on those artists and their work, and on the develpment of tourism mainly at the Côte d’Azur and the Costa Brava.

One of the principal goals of the course is to have students understand how dissimilar and even opposite cultural events (mass tourism and lyric poetry or naïf painting) overlap in their objectives. A second goal is to provide students with instruments to make cross-analysis of such events.
These goals will be pursued through lectures, assigned reading, films and paintings. The course will concentrate in the analysis of the works produced by artists during the first decades of the XXth. century in places that tourism was discovering, and on the description of the related events (sun-rush, tourism, primitivism).