New date! This talk has been rescheduled for March 3, 2010.
The Book History Colloquium at Columbia welcomes Thierry Rigogne from Fordham University’s History Department.
Well before Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Parisian cafés have shared a strong affinity with literature. In the seventeenth century, it was books, from travel accounts to medical treatises, that introduced the French to what was then a new, exotic, Oriental beverage. Writers immediately patronized the first coffeehouses, where they could discuss literature and much else, while regular patrons went to cafés to read newspapers or pamphlets. In this talk, Thierry Rigogne will explore the connections between cafés and literature in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France, a time during which they shaped each other’s development and created the figure of the literary café.
The Colloquium is open to all… for our full schedule, see:
