“Modernity is a word in search of its meaning” says Nobel-Prize winner Octavio Paz. This course will introduce you to celebrated novelists, playwrights, and thinkers whose works challenged and changed the fundamental ideas of art, language, history, and human nature. Reading list: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (any edn); Gide, The Immoralist (any edn); Ibsen, Ghosts (Dover Thrift); Kafka, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and The Burrow (any edn); Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author; Beckett, Endgame (Grove); Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (any edn); Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Requirements and Grading: final = 2 grade units; mid-term = 1 grade unit; quizzes, attendance, and participation = 1 grade unit.