This course will explore literary and cultural modernism as an international phenomenon from 1860 to the 1960s. In the context of the profound social and historical transformations of Western culture in this period, we will examine the works of literary, cinematic and theoretical creators who have come to shape our "modernity"-the consciousness we have of ourselves, of the worlds we live in, and of the temporal rhythms that determine the cadence of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century life. Readings will include: Freud, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, Apollinaire, Rilke, Pirandello, Breton, Mann, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, and Montale, among others. Films will include Modern Times, Nosferatu, and The Andalusian Dog. Theoretical essays by Benjamin, Bataille, Kristeva, and Barthes will be considered as well. We will investigate the imaginative formal responses of modernism to urban alienation and technological innovation, the personal and cultural resistance to the hegemony of bourgeois rationality, the displacement of religion and other forms of traditional spirituality, the persistence of redemptive, though endlessly unsatisfied, desire, the empowerment of the female voice, the horror and despair of world war, the fragmenting of an integrated sense of self, the proliferation of multiple perspectives in perception and narration, the irremediable break with a coherent past, the reconception of memory, the privileging of the present, and the movement from modernism to postmodernism. All readings in English. Requirements: active class participation, one class presentation, one hour-exam, one 6-page paper, and one final 10- to 12- page paper.