SURREALISM & PROSE POETRY

“Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.” —André Breton, Nadja

This infamous line, which concludes Breton’s second book, captures the complex spirit of surrealism and will equally serve as the guiding light for this course. Indifferent to talent, impatient with craft, and dismissive of poetic genius, surrealism calls to those who would delight in paroxysm and paradox, the upheaval of traditional forms and the collapse of categorical boundaries, the ruptured instant of reverie and—as René Char put it—the “exalting alliance of contraries.” This light which no longer binds beauty to a single static object, but blinds the beholder with a scene of simultaneities, will thus be our primary concern. To that end, we will consider the fundamental passageways of surrealist experience—irrational juxtapositions and chance encounters, inexhaustible unconscious desire and quotidian rapture—in the very playground of its hybrid compositions, specifically the prose poem, lyric essay, dream journal, fable, and aphorism, as well as trace the ways in which surrealist tendencies remain embedded within contemporary cross-generic forms. Our exploration of the radical amalgamation of genres will be conducted by close readings of, as well as theoretical approaches to, surrealist and surrealist-adjacent texts whose antithetical ontologies sing the emancipatory articulations of diverse aesthetic and social realities.