This seminar will explore literary and cultural modernism as an international phenomenon from 1860 to the 1970s. In the context of the profound social, political, and historical transformations of Western culture in this period, we will examine the works of literary, cinematic, and theoretical creators who have shaped our `modernity'-namely, the consciousness we have of ourselves, of the worlds we inhabit, and of the temporal rhythms that determined the cadence of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century life. Readings will include Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, Kafka, Apollinaire, Marinetti, Rilke, Pirandello, Breton, Mann, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, Celan, and Calvino, among others. Theoretical essays by Benjamin, Bataille, and Barthes will be considered as well. We will investigate the imaginative and aesthetic response of modernism to urban alienation and technological innovation, its resistance to the hegemony of bourgeois rationality, its displacement of religion and other forms of traditional spirituality, its attempt to empower the female voice, its reaction to the horror and despair of world war, its fragmenting of the self, its foregrounding of multiple perspectives of perception and narration, its rejection of the past and embracing of the present, and its metamorphosis into postmodernism. All readings in English. Format: seminar. Requirements: active class participation, one class presentation, two hour-exams, one 6-page paper, and one final 10- to 12-page paper. No prerequisites. Enrollment limit: 20 (expected: 20). (Literary Movements)