Update: This event has been postponed due to illness. We will post the new date and time as soon as we have more information. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

 

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 from the History Department at Fordham University, 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. 

Wednesday, September 30
6:00 – 7:30pm
Butler Library, Room 523

Learn more about the Book History Colloquium at Columbia. Questions? Email Gerald Cloud.