SURREALISM

This course examines the aesthetic, psycho-sexual, and socio-political dimensions and implications of Surrealism, an international avant-garde movement that emerged in Paris in the wake of World War I. Focusing on artworks from a number of different genres, we will explore such issues as: the avant-garde reformulation, subversion, and/or destruction of pre-existing artistic conventions and practices; the development of an alternative literary tradition privileging the “humour noir” of such subversive authors as Jonathan Swift and the Marquis de Sade; the celebration of dreams, desire, and the unconscious, as conceived by Sigmund Freud; the rejection of “bourgeois” values such as order, rationality, morality, decency, patriotism, work, and “high culture”; the transformation of lieux communs into artistic dreamscapes; the rhetoric of violence and anarchy; and the politics of gender.