Available to New School students in:
- Lang College

Eugene Lang College will offer a special program for students in collaboration with Parsons Paris. The emphasis is on an interdisciplinary liberal arts curriculum rooted in French literature, culture, thought, and language, and incorporate the opportunity to take a studio-based elective, an art history class, or even an online course. Classes are kept small to foster community, and the curriculum is highly contextualized for the city of Paris. Courses are taught in English, though students also register in an appropriate level of French language.

Required courses for Spring 2016:

Paris and the Personal Essay (4 credits)
Professor Elizabeth Kendall

In this Reading/Writing course, students will begin by focusing on Paris as the mid-19th century birthplace of the iconic writer/observer figure, the flaneur, as well as on the genre of the personal essay. Their main task will be to produce two substantial personal essays, using Paris as material and inspiration – the first based on their own experiences, whether encountering the city as strangers or as natives; the second built around a particular place/landmark/building (etc.) within Paris. Class material will include Woody Allen’s Paris by Midnight, as well as several classic essays - by Baudelaire, Benjamin, Henry James and others. Much of our work will focus, as students build their own personal essays, on selected essays from the 2011 personal essay anthology Paris Was Ours, edited by Penelope Rowlands. For the second, historically-themed personal essay, students will be asked to do research, (using libraries, internet, primary sources, novels, memoirs…) on whatever aspects of Parisian history are associated with the architectural or natural feature they’ve chosen as their centerpiece.

Considering Clothes (4 credits)
Professor Elizabeth Kendall

This course will attempt to get around and under the subject of clothes by thinking in fundamental yet untraditional ways – in conversation, and through writing, reading, viewing, and research. This is not a historical survey, but a meditative, light-hearted course tailored to students’ experiences and desires. Beginning with clothes-and-body memories analyzed in class discussion, we will proceed to fashion’s historic connections with French culture, then to clothes-related topics of the students’ own choosing. Exploration techniques will involve interviewing (of self and others), film viewing, reportage, field research, museum research (not only the Musee de la Mode et du Textile, but possibly military, ethnic and single-figure museums such as the Musees Carnavalet, Guimet, Hebert, Musee de la Poupee, etc.), and other self-designed excursions. Reading/viewing will include selected material ranging from the sociological to the artisanal, including critical essays (drawn from Peter McNeil and Sandra Miller’s 2014 historical survey, Fashion Writing and Criticism), personal essays (possible writers: Judith Thurman, Wayne Koestenbaum, Margo Jefferson, Joan Didion), one or two clothes-conscious novels (possible novelists: Zola, Edith Wharton, Evgenia Ginsburg, Colette), and one or two films (possible films: Swingtime, Vivre Sa Vie, La Piscine, Dior and I). Writing and other assignments will parallel the discussion material, with final, student-designed projects deliverable in any medium desired. Team projects will be honored.