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“If you love Love, you’ll love Surrealism!” declared French poet André Breton in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto. He envisaged a movement grounded in “pure psychic automatism”, which he defined as “the dictation of thought, free from any control by reason and of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation”. How this was supposed to work, we will find out over the course of the semester.
We will trace Surrealism’s foundations in the Dadaist revolt against convention and in Freud’s emphasis on dreams, desire, and the unconscious. Our focus will then shift to Britain and its cultural landscapes in the inter- to post-war periods. There, we will encounter a whole array of pioneers, provocateurs, mystics, weirdos and eccentrics from David Gascoyne to Herbert Read, and from Ithell Colquhoun to Humphrey Jennings – and do not fret if you do not know any of these names yet! While we will concentrate on poetry, the visual arts will also play a role in the seminar (think British equivalents of melting clocks and the like). Finally, we will consider some of Surrealism’s lasting influences in contemporary culture.
By the end of this seminar, you will be able to read and interpret Surrealist texts across multiple media (literature, painting, photography) and demonstrate your fluency in both poetic and visual analysis.
Please note that this course involves a relatively heavy reading load.
A reader will be made available before the beginning of the semester.
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