This course is an introduction to modern European Literature through some of its most relevant texts. We will start with two novels concerned with early commodity culture, changing gender roles, boredom, and consumption (Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Emile Zola’s Ladies’ Paradise); then we will discuss memory in the amnesiac culture of the early 20th century, and the question of time in the technologically accelerated reality of modernity (Marcel Proust’s Introduction to Remembrance of Things Past and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse). Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Gogol’s “The Overcoat”, and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis will show, in very different contexts, the importance of the work ethic for the modern subject. With Italo Calvino we will focus on postmodernism and the experimental novel, and with Antonio Tabucchi we will discuss totalitarianism and political commitment.