The seminar studies the different modernisms that exceed the traditional bounds of the canon of modernist textuality. To introduce the participants to the new directions in twentieth century studies (for instance global modernism, materialist modernism, modern cosmopolitanism) we will focus on the modern as an international, multicultural, and interdisciplinary phenomenon, (literature, arts, performance, cinema and photography) that developed in the early twentieth century out of the new economic and migratory flows put in place by colonialism.

The modern style emerges from a refusal of the ornament (Adolf Loos) in favor of minimalism (LeCorbusier, Hannes Meyer). The same streamlining of space and time, visible in the arts of the time, is fostered by Taylorism, whose mechanization of the human body in the factory resonates with and gives shape to the new Taylorized life of the modern masses. Contra this standardization of existence, guided by the work ethic, stands an impulse to the formless (Georges Bataille) and to the irrational (Surrealism) and a contestation of time understood as progress (Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson and, later, Gilles Deleuze).
The points of our discussion will be the body and sexuality, the colony and decoloniality, style, early consumerism, (anti)humanism, the fragment vs. totality, antiwork practices, the employee as a new social figure, utopia, and Lumpen Bohemia.

Readings may include texts by Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Claude Mackay, André Breton, George Orwell, Christopher Isherwood, Samuel Beckett, Mulk Raj Anand. Art by Hannah Hoch, Raul Haussman and Berlin Dada; photography by Man Ray, Claude Cahun, Lee Miller; architecture and décor by LeCorbusier and Eileen Gray; performances by Josephine Baker, Loïe Fuller, Elsa von.Freytag Loringhoven. Criticism by Sanford Kwinter, Janet Lyon, Sylvia Wynter, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Krakauer, Adorno and Horkheimer, Fredric Jameson, Silvia Federici, Beatriz Colomina, Matt Fournier et al.