An exploration of the culture of industrial capitalism called Modernity, and a survey of some of the literary work that has emerged in response to that culture, often designated by the capacious term “Modernism.” The class will begin by reading selections from three so-called “Prophets of Modernity”: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. We will then use the framework offered by these three authors to analyze a number of literary works from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will read poetry by William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, H. D., and T. S. Eliot; fiction from Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys; drama by Samuel Beckett; and cultural criticism from Matthew Arnold, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin. All of these authors are concerned, in one way or another, with the plight of the individual in an increasingly alienating environment, with the relations of men and women, with the dynamics of race and social class, and with the problematic role of culture in the new “modern” world. These will be our concerns as well.