"Modernism" in literature refers to texts from the second half of the nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century. These works are typically at once self-referential and extra-referential; books acutely aware of their own status as language nevertheless aspire to describe, or even save, the world beyond words. Insofar as modernism posits an aestheticism that can seem redemptive, a concern of the course will be the relation of modernism to modernity: the new world that needs saving. The American version of modernism will have the additional challenge of producing out of the difficulties of self-conscious fiction a redemption that suits a democracy--and a multiply divided democracy at that. Writers of the course will include DuBois, Larsen, Hemingway, Faulkner, Stein, Toomer, Hurston, Williams and Agee.