Transatlantic Surrealisms

Catalog description

“Surreal” refers to what is incongruous, uncanny, or downright bizarre. Those terms describe many poetic and artistic productions belonging to Surrealism, without for all that explaining the literary and theoretical underpinnings of the movement at its origins in the 1920s, or accounting for the international flowering of its ideas and its continued influence. The class will attempt to trace the complexities of Surrealism from its modernist prehistory, through “canonization,” to diversification and waning in the 1960s. We will also study surrealism vis-à-vis the shift in cultural capital from Europe to the New World, and reverberations in subsequent artistic forms. Taught in English.