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Modernism is often understood as having discovered new ways of rendering private, psychological life. Writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, for instance, wrote prose that gave its readers the feeling of being inside someone’s head. But these forays into new psychological interiors were composed within particular architectural arrangements, and described particular kinds of rooms. In this course, we will consider how access to or a lack of privacy – in Woolf’s phrase, “a room of one’s own” – shapes modernist literature. As the semester continues, we will see the resonances of “privacy” expand beyond its physical meaning to include emotional, identitarian, and cultural privacies. Novelists include Woolf, CLR James, Nella Larsen, and Willa Cather; poets include Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens.