This seminar offers a cross-section of some of the key works of, and debates surrounding, modernism in literature, film and painting. Some of the key issues to be discussed include: ekphrasis, the transparency/opacity of language, disillusionment and isolation, perspectivism, cultural instability, psychology and the self, spectatorship, questioning of traditional modes, representations of reality, pessimism/nihilism/existentialism and mass culture. We will cover the following writers, artists and movements:
Literature - Balzac, Huysmans, Stein, Kafka, Moore, Woolf, Williams, Dos Passos, Rhys, Miller
Art - Alfred Stieglitz circle, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, New York School
Film - Wiene, Keaton, Léger, Man Ray, Dreyer, Vertov, Buñuel, Chaplin, Chuck Jones

This course will include a reader, in-class film screenings as well as the following books:
Huysmans – Against the Grain
Dos Passos – Manhattan Transfer