Modernism in Arts, Design and Entertainment

This course will take us on a whirlwind tour across the jagged landscapes of modernist innovation, both avant-garde and popular - taking in literary fiction, poetry, drama, pulp genres (crime, science fiction and fantasy), comic strips and books, visual arts and architecture, fashion and design, music and dance.  Our starting point will be current debates about the scope and meaning of the term modernism, followed by an exploration of its diverse formal experiments and social and intellectual concerns in the first half of the twentieth century