This course examines the relationship between mobility, spatial politics, and poetic form in modernism. From vers libre to Surrealist dérives, modernist literature draws strongly on the political, ethical, and imaginative significance of movement, fundamentally connecting mobility to notions of freedom, progress, and change. Moreover, the explosion of modernist art and literature in France and Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries took place in a social context of radical changes in forms of individual and collective movement. Technologies like the subway, the automobile, the plane, and the bicycle altered notions of space and time, while women exercised new forms of autonomy of movement and transgressed gendered notions of public space. In the same decades, two World Wars reshaped Europe’s borders, passports were introduced, and waves of refugees fleeing religious persecution and war heightened xenophobic desires for closed borders and regulation—desires reaching their height in the trains, ghettos, and death camps of the Holocaust. In readings extending from the flâneur poems of Charles Baudelaire to the Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound, we will investigate the spatial poetics—and politics—of writers like Stéphane Mallarmé, Hope Mirrlees, T. S. Eliot, and the Surrealists, and consider the connections between the poetic line and spatial movement, along with concepts like transport, crossing, passage, progress, flight, etc. French readings will be provided in English. (C, G, H)