SOURCE: “Modernism as Exile: Fitzgerald, Barnes, and the Unreal City,” in Imagining Paris, Yale University Press, 1993, pp. 185-242.

In the following essay, Kennedy contrasts the depictions of French and American life in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood.

Gertrude Stein remarked that modernist writers and artists of her time had converged on the capital of France because “Paris was where the twentieth century was.” The city not only incorporated within its diverse cultural life the most distinctive projects and features of modernism, but (as her claim implies) it had also become a geographical sign of the modern. Other European cities—notably Vienna, Berlin, and London—had harbored important avant-garde coteries during the two decades bracketing the turn of the century, but by 1910, Paris had achieved preeminence as a site of modernist production. Stein suggests that she became an exile in order to position...