Art, society and culture of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century is often characterized as “modern.” What does this mean? In what ways do we understand the dramatic changes in technological and mass production that altered how the world was seen and, in turn, how a new aesthetic of the modern world was created? Through a survey of literary works from France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States this course explores these questions.
Some of the key issues to be discussed include: the metropolis and the experience of the landscape of the city; the aesthetics of shock, fragmentation, discontinuity and montage; the transparency and opacity of language; and the modernist critique of civilization, technology and enlightenment. For each of the works considered in this course, we will examine their interrelationships and their formal and conceptual inventiveness. We will also consider the wider implications (artistic, social, political and cultural) of our findings.

Readings will include: Yeats, Baudelaire, Proust, Woolf, Faulkner, Eliot, Kafka, Joyce, Stein, Williams, H.D., Mansfield, Stevens and Beckett. This course will include a reader as well as the following books:
Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time, Vol. I: Swann's Way
Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway
William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying