My dissertation, Minor Moments in Modern Literature and Film, follows a unique set of works in modern literature and cinema that moves beyond the grand events and dramatic scenes of traditional narratives. Throughout its chapters, I locate the beginning of this aesthetic development in the nineteenth-century novel, with the writings of Stendhal and Flaubert, but also in a line of twentieth and twenty-first-century works, including the stories and novels of Franz Kafka, Natalie Sarraute, Jorge Luis Borges, and Milan Kundera; along with the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Lucrecia Martel, Pawel Pawlikowski, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, among others. By examining a series of specific scenes in these literary and cinematic works, the main aim of my study is to rethink and to reframe our understanding of the “modern” as precisely that which resists great events and actions, as well as the dominant values that they represent, which I characterize as the “myth of great events.”