Modern European literature (1850-2000) through some of its most relevant texts from France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Ireland. Topics: early commodity culture, changing gender roles, boredom, and consumption (Flaubert and Zola); memory in the amnesiac culture of the early 20th century, and time in technologically accelerated modernity (Proust, and Woolf); the importance of the work ethic for the modern subject (Mann, and Kafka); Calvino and postmodernism; Tabucchi the resistance to fascism. Doyle on working-class life in Dublin, and Lakhous on migration and multicultural Europe.