War, Fashion, Big Cities, and Sex: all four are embattled terrain, if not constitutive features, of modernity. This class gives the student a grounding in foundational literary and non-literary modernist texts, alongside an emphasis on the body as it appears in literature, sociology, and contemporary prose of the period; we will track changing depictions of sexuality with the emergence of the New Woman, Dorian Gray's relentless quest for new sensations, the "invention" of shell shock as a form of trauma, sartorial fashion, and urban experience. We will read novels, modern poetry, some manifestos, one popular best-seller of the 1920s, and close-read one great painting by the Impressionist Edouard Manet that mingles advertising, prostitution, sensual pleasure, the (proto-) little black dress, and urban spectacle.