You will explore representations of everyday life in 20th century literature and film, both in English and in translation. Everyday life seems a fairly obvious concept, but as Maurice Blanchot has argued, ‘the everyday is what is most difficult to discover … the everyday escapes'. While the everyday is a profoundly democratic concept – everyone has an everyday life, after all – the everyday has also been the prime battle ground of ideology in modern times, the space in each our lives most thoroughly infiltrated by the values of those in power, mass media, and commodities. Exploring representations of everyday life in 20th century literature and film will help you gain insight into the production and development of modernity, the diversity of modern experience across cultures, and the ways in which our daily lives have been shaped over time by ideological myths. Throughout this module, you will engage with theories of modernity, aesthetics, and cultural politics to ask how literature and film represent, defamiliarise, and critique everyday life in the modern world. Indicative topics may include: the everyday and the stream-of-consciousness novel, boredom in literature and film, avant-garde aesthetics and the extraordinary, archiving the everyday, war and the suspension of everyday life, gendered everyday practices, forms of protest, and non-western representations of the everyday.You will study a selection of key literary and cinematic works to build a critical understanding of the different ways authors and filmmakers have responded to changes in everyday life across the twentieth century. Henri Lefebvre argues that everyday life as we now know it took shape in the 1910s and 20s, so the module will begin with works from that period. We will then look at how European avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, such as surrealism, aimed to defamiliarise the everyday, unveiling the extraordinary within the ordinary. We will then explore mid-twentieth century works that deal with the impact of total war on everyday life. The last part of the module moves through the later decades of the century to explore everyday life and modernity as global theoretical constructs. Throughout, we will examine how social, political, and technological changes in everyday life underpin modern movements in literature and film. The module does not chart an evolution of everyday life through the twentieth century, but instead focuses on different strategies that authors and filmmakers have used to grapple with the problems and potential of everyday life. Throughout the module, we will put our core texts in dialogue with interdisciplinary readings theorising everyday life.