This module introduces students to key modernist texts, such as James Joyce's Dubliners, Marcel Proust's Combray and poems by TS Eliot, WB Yeats and HD, and it explores the ways in which modernist texts challenge previous literary traditions. In the first semester we will study modernist texts in relation to questions about the nature of modern subjectivity, metropolitan life, history and philosophical theories of time. In the second semester, we will focus on two areas: first, we will study avant-garde theories of modernist poetry and prose; and second, we will analyse in detail the novels of Virginia Woolf.