City of night: Parisian Explorations

Abstract

The city of Paris is a primary cultural site for western/European modernism. Creative and critical projects engaging with Parisian modernities work collectively to remember the city as spectacle: as myth, legend and icon. This study examines Philippe Soupault’s Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (1928), seeing it as a modernist work typifying the Surrealist fascination with the city at night. It argues that Soupault’s novel renders Paris as urban spectacle, manifesting an experiential urban mode, or poetics of place, that foreshadows the experiments of the Situationists and the contemporary civic festival, the Nuit Blanche.