This course undertakes the impossible but exhilarating task of mapping a movement from modernist fiction and film anchored in imagined national communities to more recent work that engages the global and transnational settling and unsettling of community and communication. We will read selected James Joyce stories, Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, Graham Green’s The Third Man and Dubravka Ugresic’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. We will also screen Carol Reed’s The Third Man and Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire. Course requirements include close work with the primary texts and films, individual presentations and short essays on questions raised by individual works. W-credit.


Major Texts: Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts; James Joyce, Dubliners; Graham Green: the Third Man, Dubravka Ugresic, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and essays by, Eliot, Woolf, Kincaid, Bayard and Lyotard.