The aim of this class will be to explore the broad cultural manifestations that have been described as "modern" or "modernist" while distinguishing these terms from the idea of the "avant-garde". Modernism probably started when the question ritually asked on the covers of today's fashion magazines ("What is modern now?") started acquiring relevance for artists and writers, ie. around the end of the 19th century. What did it mean to feel "modern" in 1870? Was the term synonymous with the more militant idea of the "avant-garde"? Can one distinguish between political and artistic issues when talking about avant-garde movements? Is "modern" a purely historical term (corresponding roughly to the three decades between 1910 and 1930) or should it be used in a much broader sense? Why are some crucial modernist writers such bold experimenters in their writing and so conservative in ideology and politics? Why can one find modernist writers so aggressively feminist (Ibsen, Loy) whereas others can be rabidly chauvinistic (Lewis)?

These are some of the questions we will pose when studying a few exemplary writers and artists. We will examine important precursors (Ibsen, Rimbaud and Hopkins) before focusing on important movements such as Dadaism, Futurism, Vorticism and Surrealism and on a number of writers and artists who played an important role in subsequent redefinitions of the idea of the modern while criticizing the very concept of "modernism": Proust, Duchamp, Beckett and Borges.