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Books Like Le Paysan de Paris by Louis Aragon
Surrealist urban prose poem — Paris arcades as modern mythology
Aragon's irrational traversal of the Passage de l'Opéra (about to be demolished) and the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont at night (1926) — the founding text of Surrealist urban experience, inventing a 'modern mythology' of commercial space; what made Walter Benjamin's heart pound.
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Nadja
by André Breton
The parallel text — Breton's Surrealist novel of Paris wandering (1928) follows Le Paysan de Paris by two years; comparing the two gives the range of Surrealist urban experience, with Aragon's more lyrical and Breton's more narrative approach to the same Paris streets.
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Buy on AmazonL'Amour fou
by André Breton
Breton's theoretical prose-poem on objective chance (1937) develops the same Surrealist urban sensitivity that Le Paysan de Paris inaugurates — the flea market chapter in particular is the fullest theoretical account of the experience Aragon's book enacts.
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Buy on AmazonManifeste du surréalisme
by André Breton
The theoretical text that Le Paysan de Paris is the most successful early realization of — Aragon's practice of 'irrational attentiveness' to the Paris arcade enacts what the Manifesto calls for before the Manifesto itself was published.
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Buy on AmazonPetits poèmes en prose
by Charles Baudelaire
The founding text of urban prose poetry (1869) from which Le Paysan de Paris descends — the flâneur in the Paris arcades, the transformation of commercial space into lyric subject matter, the walker who turns the city into a poem; the genealogy is direct.
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Buy on AmazonArcades Project
by Walter Benjamin
Benjamin's great unfinished work (written 1927-40) was directly stimulated by Le Paysan de Paris — his philosophical reading of the Paris arcades is the most important response to Aragon's book; the two works in dialogue give the fullest picture of what the Paris arcade meant to European intellectual life.
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Les Champs magnétiques
by André Breton and Philippe Soupault
The first automatic writing experiment (1920) — the founding text of Surrealist automatic prose that Le Paysan de Paris is both inheriting and transforming into a more controlled, more beautiful form.
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Buy on AmazonLa Nausée
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre's 1938 existentialist novel shares with Le Paysan de Paris the phenomenological attention to the city and its objects — but where Aragon finds the marvelous in the ordinary, Sartre finds nausea; comparing the two gives the range of what attentive urban experience can produce.
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Buy on AmazonIlluminations
by Arthur Rimbaud
Rimbaud's prose poems are the most important poetic predecessor of Le Paysan de Paris — both treat the urban landscape as a space for visionary hallucination; Aragon's Paris arcade and Rimbaud's impossible cities share the quality of ordinary space transformed by irrational attention.
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