How to Do Things with Modernism

When was modernism? Where was modernism? Whose was modernism? How can we use it now? Answers to these questions have changed radically over the past few years, as scholars have developed more expansive, inclusive, interdisciplinary understandings of a movement always on the move, changing shape and meaning according to its sites, practitioners, and publics. This seminar teaches students to recognize and read modernist artforms and practices—in literature, film, performance, and the visual arts—across an international horizon, and to put them in conversation with one another, with their contexts, and with our own.