This seminar will explore literary and cultural modernism as an international phenomenon from 1860 to the 1970s. 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 shaped our "modernity": namely, the consciousness we have of ourselves, of the worlds we live in, 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, Calvino, and Duchamp among others. Theoretical essays by Benjamin, Bataille, and Barthes will be considered as well. We will investigate the imaginative and aesthetic response of modernism (in its cubist, futurist, surrealist, existentialist, and feminist forms) to urban alienation and the rise of the machine. Attention will be given as well to modernism's attack against religion and other forms of traditional spirituality, its revolt against rationality and social convention, its reaction to the horror and despair of world war, its attempt to empower the female voice, its acceptance of a fragmented notion of self, its privileging of multiple perspectives of perception and narration, its rejection of the past, its embracing of the present, and its metamorphosis into postmodernism. All readings in English. Format: lecture/discussion. Requirements: active class participation, one class presentation, one hour-exam, three papers. No prerequisites. Enrollment limit: 19 (expected: 19). (Literary Movements)