Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: Travel and Transport in Modern Literature and the Arts

This course studies how new modes of transportation and the experiences they enabled stood as symbols of both the fears and joys of rapid modernization in 19th- and 20th-century literature, film, and visual art. How did the speeding locomotive, the plane's aerial view, and the personal freedom of the automobile transform the ways people traversed space, experienced time, traded, and came into contact with one another? In formal terms, how did these experiences inspire innovations in the media we examine by Whitman, Kipling, Baudelaire, Marinetti, Brecht, Woolf, Huxley, Stein, Ruttman, Wegman, Picabia, Duchamp and others? No prerequisites.