Surrealist Art and Writing, 1919–1939: The Gold of Time

by Jack J. Spector

• ISBN13: 9780521657396
• ISBN10: 0521657393
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-01-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Surrealist Art and Writing offers a fresh analysis of Surrealism, the avant-garde movement that, in its search for contemporary lyricism and imagery, united literature and art to politics and psychology. Examining Surrealism's main phases from a variety of perspectives, Jack Spector emphasises the rebellion of the protagonists against their middle-class education. In Manifestos and Manifestations the Surrealists promoted Marxist over liberal politics; Freudian psychoanalysis over French psychiatry; Hegelian dialectics over Cartesian logic; and the outmoded, psychotic, or childish over modernist art. This study offers a coherent overview of the exciting and important interwar period in Europe. In particular it places avant-garde ideas and imagery within the historical and political contexts of the 1920s and 30s, integrating them into contemporary artistic and ideological currents.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Breaking the institutional codes: revolution in the classroom

3. The politics of dream and the dream of politics

4. In the service of which revolution? An aborted incarnation of the dream: Marxism and Surrealism

5. Surrealism and painting (The ineffable)

6. The Surrealist woman and the colonial other.