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Break of Day
Originally published in France in 1934, Break of Day is Andrä Breton?s second collection of critical and polemical essays, following The Lost Steps (Nebraska 1996). In fewer than two hundred pages, it captures the first full decade of the surrealist movement. The collection opens with an essay composed in 1924 that examines key elements of surrealism and concludes with Breton?s harsh revaluation in 1933 of automatic writing. ø Among the other essays in the volume are ?Burial Denied? and ?In Self-Defense,? two pieces that, in translator Mark Polizzotti?s words, ?mark surrealism?s conscious break from the mainstream and the beginning of its attempts to work alongside the French Communist Party.? Also included are ?Psychiatry Standing before Surrealism,? which addresses Breton?s complex, ambivalent views on mental illness and the emerging psychiatric establishment; ?Introduction to Achim von Arnim's Strange Tales,? which reveals surrealism?s debt to such precursors as the German romantics and delineates a surrealistic aesthetic of the macabre; and ?Picasso in His Element,? in which Breton demonstrates his formidable talents as a critic of the visual arts.
André Breton
In this volume Mary Ann Caws revises her 1974 treatise on Breton, adopting a new approach, considering different essays, and concentrating on new aspects of Breton's works. Caws structures her study by concentrating on the surrealist elements in Breton's works, with a full chapter devoted to his poems and surrealist poetry. As one of Breton's most frequent translators and a long-time acquaintance of Breton's last two wives, Caws' viewpoint is both intimate and impassioned.
André Breton
"This is a kind of "essence of Breton," variously translated by some of our finest writers, each of whom highlights different facets of Breton's complex work. Mark Polizzotti's useful introduction provides context and a brief analysis of the artist and his times."--Diane di Prima, author of Recollections of My Life as a Woman "Mark Polizzotti, who is a poet, a translator, and the author of the definitive biography of Andre Breton, has chosen stellar translations of Breton's dazzling poetry and placed it in its lively context. This shapely introduction to the life and work of Andre Breton is smart, concise, and exciting. I cannot imagine a better one."--Ron Padgett, poet and translator of The...
The Lost Steps
The Lost Steps (Les Pas perdus) is Andri Breton's first collection of critical and polemical essays. Composed between 1917 and 1923, these pieces trace his evolution during the years when he was emerging as a central figure in French (and European) intellectual life. They chronicle his tumultuous passage through the Dada movement, proclaim his explosive views on Modernism and its heroes, and herald the emergence of Surrealism itself. Along the way, we are given Breton's serious commentaries on his Modernist predecessors, Guillaume Apollinaire and Alfred Jarry, followed by his not-so-serious Dada manifestoes. Also included are portraits of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Breton's mysteri...
André Breton
Breton's stature is much greater than that of a number of contemporaries who have received, already, far more attention from the critics than he. It provides justification without excuse, especially when the commentator's purpose is to shed light on the intricacies of Breton's mind, the significance of his original work, or the impact of his ideas on twentieth-century culture. Hence the aim pursued in the present study may be stated without further preamble: To attempt to broaden understanding of the evolution of Andr Breton's thinking during a critical period in his life, the one which brought him to leadership of the surrealist movement in France. Evidently, the focus here is narrow, the goal being to give clearer definition to the intellectual state of a young man emerging from doubt--and so from self-doubt--into renewed confidence in his poetic calling.
Nadja
"Nadja, " originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in teh city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. "The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen, " Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.
