This course will introduce you to celebrated novelists, poets, and playwrights whose works probed the modern condition and defined modern esthetic values in Europe from the mid-nineteenth century through the aftermath of World War II. Reading List: Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (selections); Flaubert, Sentimental Education; Ibsen, Ghosts; Kafka, The Trial; Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author; Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Celan and Akhmatova (Selections). (This is a reading-intensive course: before the beginning of the quarter, you must read Sentimental Education). Numerous short assignments and a final.