The first half of the twentieth century was marked by extraordinary social and political upheaval. The same era witnessed a feverishly creative revolution in the nature and strategies of artistic representation. In this course we will examine what these two kinds of crisis have to do with one another: how a wide range of startling innovations in literary and cinematic art may be seen as responses to the particular pressures of the historical crises they represent. Focussing mainly on Britain, we will study such diverse historical crises as the spread of anarchism around the turn of the century; the sensational advent of a public discourse of homosexuality in the trials of Oscar Wilde; the Irish and the Bolshevik revolutions; the woman's suffrage movement and the emergence of the so-called "New Woman"; and the global traumas of World Wars I and II. Novels, plays, poems and films will be studied for their distinctive, often dazzling aesthetic strategies for representing these crises, and will include such works as Conrad's The Secret Agent, Bely's Petersburg, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Forster's Howards End, O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, poems of Yeats and Owen, Ford's Parade's End, Eisenstein's Potemkin, and Heller's Catch-22. Requirements: active participation in class discussions, two papers, and a final exam. Prerequisite: 100-level course, except 150. Enrollment limit:25. (Post-1900)