Surrealism

10 Key excerpts on "Surrealism"

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  Surrealism

  • Natalya Lusty(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  This volume examines some of the salient ideas and practices that have shaped Surrealism as a protean intellectual and cultural concept, paying close attention to its prevailing experimental impetus through which it fundamentally shifted our understanding of the nexus between art, culture, and politics. Surrealism’s longevity and the ongoing reconceptualization of its constitutive boundaries (invariably articulated through its manifestos and political tracts), in addition to its anti-colonial political position, precipitated an international movement that challenged the Eurocentric 1 parameters of modernism and the avant-garde. By bringing literary forms into conversation with other art practices (photography, film, fashion, display) and emerging intellectual traditions (ethnography, modern sci- ence, anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis), the essays in this volume trace the wide impact and legacy of Surrealism across the humanities and social sciences. No other avant-garde movement has achieved this level of temporal and conceptual resilience, making it one of the most dynamic critical concepts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a movement that sought to unite radical forms of politics with a belief in the importance of the imagination, or to make the imagination a site of broader cultural and political renewal, Surrealism distanced itself from the remit of modernism and its attendant claims to experimental formalism and aestheticism. While the entanglements between the avant-garde and modernism proper are perhaps more complex than Surrealism’s avowed claims to exceptionalism, its endeavours to qualify and requalify its pos- ition created a movement that was continually responsive to the political contingencies of the present.

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  Surrealism in Latin American Literature

  Searching for Breton's Ghost

  • M. Nicholson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Manifesto of Surrealism , says Michael Benedikt, was “as productive to the growth of Surrealism beyond its early years as any deliberate allowance for variation” (xvii). Roger Shattuck emphasizes the important role of these unresolved antinomies when he suggests that “the excitement of the surrealist object or work is its attempt, not to obliterate or climb higher than the big contradictions, but to stand firmly upon them as the surest ground” (“Introduction” 22). This excitement—embracing both devoted enthusiasm and bitter vituperation—established Surrealism’s place as the latecomer but also the late-stayer among avant-garde movements.

  Defining Features of Surrealist Thought

  By the late twentieth century, the adjective “surreal” had settled itself in English parlance as a general name for the odd, the unexpected, or the absurd. Surrealism’s founders, however, had in mind something much more specific, and any study of the movement and its sequelae must address itself to these original intentions. The following pages present the key tenets of surrealist thought as it developed in France in the 1920s and 1930s, which will serve as a foundation for a more extended look at Latin American surrealist literature.

  Surrealism was originally conceived not as a literary or artistic school, much less a set of techniques or a mere style. It was rather a mode of thought that was meant to subvert all conventional modes of thought and even to change the nature of thought itself. The most sustained effort at explaining Surrealism conceptually is Ferdinand Alquié’s The Philosophy of Surrealism , first published in French in 1955. Alquié observes that Surrealism “involves an authentic theory of love, of life, of the imagination, of the relations between man and the world” (2). For him, “all this supposes a philosophy,” an assumption that allows Alquié to reconcile his admiration for Breton—the movement’s “intellectual and reflective consciousness”—with his admiration for Plato, Descartes, and Kant (2, 4). The Philosophy of Surrealism

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  The Language of Surrealism

  • Peter Stockwell(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  That said, and though biography, culture, and the context of creativity will all feature throughout this book, the objective is not really to produce historicised interpretations – new read-ings of surrealist works. Offering to resolve surrealist writing by proffering an interpreta-tion largely misses the point of Surrealism. The central concern is to present an account of how Surrealism works, as a means of understanding its significance and persisting power. 35 3 L a n g u a g e i n S u r r e a l i s t T h o u g h t Language and linguistics Surrealism arose in Western Europe at a moment in history that was pivotal and con-vulsive in different ways. The First World War, the Marxist revolution in Russia, mass education, the first elements of state welfare, the rise of trade unionism into political party representation, moves towards women’s suffrage, the final consolidations of Euro-pean colonial empires, the development of wireless radio technology, the rise of cin-ema, powered flight, the factory assembly line, the shift from horse-power to motorised vehicle – all of these formed the social background to the first few decades of the new century. Whatever their participants’ geographical origins, Surrealism was also an urban phenomenon, and the culture of Paris, Berlin, Zurich, Madrid, and London was modern, technologically advanced, and thoroughly industrialised. From a historical perspective, in order to understand how Surrealism foregrounded abnormality, irrationality, and the marvellous, it would be important to understand what in their surroundings was regarded as normal and current. Such a dense cultural description is larger than the scope of this book, but here in this chapter I would like to consider more specifically what was the surrealists’ contemporary thinking on the study of language.

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  Econ-Art

  Divorcing Art From Science in Modern Economics

  • Rick Szostak(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  They responded to a ‘longing for the unattainable’ (Fleming 1970, p. 519), a nostalgia for the absolute. The world we live in was the basis only for flights of fancy. Hubert speaks of Surrealist book illustrators: rather than taking the traditional view of the text as a model for which they were to provide a graphic equivalent, they viewed it only as a stimulus to their imagination (1988, p. 344). Never before had art been so detached from reality: 3 26 ECON-ART In their relentless pursuit of another world, the Surrealists carefully avoid traditional forms of representation that in one way or another favor a mechanical adherence to the tangible world of experience … Artistic manipulation and dream activity provide necessary media-tions that encourage them to transform recognizable or descriptive reality into otherness. This does not mean that allusions to everyday existence cannot be traced in Surrealist works in general and books in particular. (Hubert 1988, p. 343) While Surrealism was born and prospered in the France of the 1920s, its effect on twentieth-century art was pervasive. Hauser (1956) hailed it as the dominant art form of this century. ‘Surrealism is a far-ranging and constantly renewable current of thought and actions which cannot be assigned rigid historical limits, much less confined to the destiny of a single individual’ (Rosemount 1978, p. 7). Sylvester argues that rather than contin-uing in the post-war world as a narrowly defined school, ‘the spirit of Surrealism … has come to be diffused into most of the outstanding art of the time’ (1978, p. 5). The turmoil of the Depression and Second World War could only encourage the international spread of the movement (in particular, various French Surrealists were forced to take refuge in the United States during the war).

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  Surrealist Women

  • Penelope Rosemont(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • The Athlone Press

    (Publisher)

  In poetry, painting, collage, sculpture, photography, film, dance, games, critical theory, and politics, Surrealism is always new because the subversive imagina-tion is always right now, when you need it, ready or not. What is perhaps most noticeable about Surrealism today is the greatly en-larged field of its researches and applications. Entire fields that surrealists in the past either bypassed altogether or considered marginal — such as music, dance, architecture, and animated film — are now important areas of surrealist inquiry and activity. A heightened interest in Black music, for example, especially jazz and blues, has been highly visible throughout the international Surrealist Movement since the 1960s. This passional attraction has led to several impor-tant books and numerous articles as well as to an informal but fruitful collabo-ration and exchange of views between surrealists in several countries and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a Chicago-based group dedicated to the propagation of Great Black Music. 4 The exploration of subversive currents in popular culture — comics, films, pulp fiction, radio, etc. — has been a fascinating surrealist sideline from the be-ginning, but in recent years has grown into one of the most luxuriant fields of surrealist research. 5 History, a discipline in which only a few surrealists inter-vened effectively in the past — has also emerged as a significant focus. As rein-terpreters of history, surrealists such as Alena Nadvornfkova, Hilary Booth, and Nancy Joyce Peters have been interested in the study of heresies, revolu-tionary struggles, Utopias, Native American and African American culture and resistance, ecology and the relations between humankind and animals, cranks and other neglected figures, changes in language (especially slang), vandalism and workplace sabotage, the popular arts — and Surrealism itself.

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  DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect

  • R. Bruce Elder(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wilfrid Laurier University Press

    (Publisher)

  Surrealism and the Cinema 271 poem could convey the experience of people who, when seeing the sun rise, do not see simply a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea, but experience an innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” The poetic image embodies the unfettered mind. It reveals the triumph of the imagination—indeed, sometimes, as we will see, it releases a noetic process even higher than the imagination, a negative faculty that liquefies all the fixed certainties of the limited bourgeois self and enables us to make contact with a sur-réalité . The Surrealists were intrigued by such intensification of poetic imagery— and the form of dream, with its disjointed accolage of scenes from everyday life (including the material of the day residue) and extremely intimate details, was therefore attractive to them. That the form of a dream is not like that of a conventional story was one reason why the Surrealists were so hostile to narrative. When André Breton came to write the first Manifeste du sur-réalisme (Manifesto of Surrealism) in 1924, the full force of the Surrealists’ attack on the novel had already been unleashed. The novel, as epitomized in the works of Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) and Émile Zola (1840–1902), reflected the imperatives of logic and description—it was this that led to such false devices as giving precise descriptions to the clothing, bearing, and gait of completely fictional entities. In the world of dreams, where appearance can change from moment to moment, where space is pliable and time has no meaning, the practice of providing an exact concrete setting for every action seems simply risible. At first, Surrealists sought to endow their literary production with the attributes of dream, by producing them in trances or “sleeping fits.” How-ever, the creative method based on sleeping fits proved to have its dangers. Once the entire group, in a hypnotic trance, attempted a collective suicide.

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  Surrealism Against the Current

  Tracts and Declarations

  • Michael Richardson, Krzysztof Fijalkowski(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  This perception may be said to be the foundation of Surrealism, announced in the first major collective declaration given by the surrealists: ‘We have nothing to do with literature, but when necessary we are as capable as anyone else of making use of it’ (see p. 24). Not a new poetic form, Surrealism was ‘a cry of the mind turning back on itself and it is determined to smash its fetters’ (ibid.). Despite this insistence, which Surrealism consistently maintained as among its first and most determining principles, it is precisely as a poetic form that many critics have sought to judge it. Yet the specificity of Surrealism can hardly even be considered in such terms. If Surrealism has any meaning – at least in terms understood by the surrealists themselves – it is precisely due not simply to the rupture it made with traditional ideas of the role of the artist; it also involved a clear break with the modernism of which Dada was the most radical expression. It is in this refusal to be confined within poetic form (even an anti-poetic form) that the specificity of Surrealism must be sought, and it is also this that marks it off from the intellectual movements that preceded it and, indeed, from those that followed it. And this investigation – an investigation founded in revolt and rage – was above all to be centred in a rejection of an Enlightenment individualism which, during the nineteenth century, had led to art being considered the product of genius. In reaction, for Surrealism, poetry was seen as the preserve of all, founded in a collective endeavour whose interstices also needed to be explored collectively

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  Surrealism and Cinema

  • Michael Richardson(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Berg Publishers

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 1 Surrealism and Popular Culture An interest in popular culture was apparent in Surrealism from the beginnings of the movement. Partly this was a provocation against bourgeois notions of excellence, an aspect of the surrealists’ revolt against what they perceived as a decadent culture. But it also responded to a deeper need that had drawn intellectuals during the nineteenth century, well represented by Rimbaud’s celebration of ‘stupid paintings, door panels, stage sets, back-drops for acrobats, signs, popular engravings, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books with bad spelling, novels of our grandfathers, fairy tales, little books from childhood, old operas, ridiculous refrains, naïve rhythms’ (1966: 193). This attitude had its roots in German romanticism and its revolt against the classicism and elitism of the Enlightenment. Seeking the genius of the Volk in the culture of ordinary people, the romantics sought out the traces of folk traditions in their legends, myths and fairy stories. Of course, the surrealists shared none of the latent, and sometimes manifest, nationalism behind the German romantics’ valorisation of folk culture. Nevertheless, like the romantics, the surrealists were concerned with the reconsideration of tradition. Their interest, however, assumed a much broader extent: in their internationalism, they were concerned with a universal sense of cultural tradition and what this could mean.

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  French Novelists of Today

  • Milton H. Stansbury(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  Full of extraordinary images and of perfect grammatical con-struction, they appeared to me to contain certain poetic elements of the finest quality. It was only later that Soupault and I ven-tured voluntarily to induce the state of mind in which this would occur. It was sufficient to exclude the exterior world, and after two months' effort, these sentences would reproduce themselves with such extraordinary rapidity that we were reduced to ab-breviations in order to record them. Les Champs magnétiques was the first fruit of this discovery, and since then I have never ceased to be persuaded that nothing of value can be said or done except by following this magic dictation. Demonstrating that by allowing the hand to trace at random the words suggested by the subconscious mind, a multitude of sudden and accidental conflicts between words and ideas would result, the Surrealists insisted that this joining of delightfully audacious images was capable of opening unexplored horizons unfettered by banal associations. This, then, is Surrealism: a certain psychic automa-tism corresponding most nearly to a state of dreaming in which are recorded, either by writing or some other means, the inner-most functioning of the mind. Some may prefer the more com-plicated definition which Aragon as a Surrealist draws up: Surrealism denies the real to move in the unreal; denies in turn the unreal; and this double negation, far from resulting m the affirmation of the real, confounds it with the unreal, but goes beyond these two ideas in seizing a middle term where both are denied and affirmed, conciliated and contained. Aragon concedes that all surrealistic inspiration is not of equal value; its value will depend on the force and originality of the person who experiments. It is not sufficient to induce the FRENCH NOVELISTS OF TODAY state of dreaming; the dream must be well reported, and its form and substance good.

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  Foucault and Religion

  • Jeremy Carrette(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  30

  If Surrealism is envisaged as the emergence of a heterogeneous science, its relationship with contemporary French critical theory becomes much clearer. Wills has already made this point in relation to the specific question of language in his exploration of the work of Derrida and the surrealist Desnos. Wills’ pioneering study confirmed

  the fact that both Surrealism and recent critical theory have set themselves comparable tasks, however important the divergence might seem from other points of view, namely to reassess the means by which language functions as a referential and representational system.31

  Surrealism therefore not only enabled Foucault and the Tel Quel group to explore the labyrinths of language, but it also offered ways to think outside of formal logic, to transgress, and to think differently, the hallmarks of his thought. As Foucault, reflecting on his work towards the end of his life, states:

  There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself would better be left backstage; or, at best, that they might properly form part of those preliminary exercises that are forgotten once they have served their purpose. But, then, what is philosophy today – philosophical activity, I mean – if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself ? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?32

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