COML 2200 - [Thinking Surrealisms]

(crosslisted)
(also ARTH 2019, VISST 2190) (LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015.

B. Maxwell.

Borrowing its title from a formulation of Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, and beginning from the “forays of demoralization” instigated by the Dadas, who bequeathed to surrealism the precious gift of unreconciliation to the given, this course ranges over several surrealist moments: the inception of surrealist precept and practice in Paris in the mid-1920s; the explicitly anti-fascist political phase of the 1930s and 40s; the supplementation of Parisian surrealism by Caribbean, Mexican, African American, Quebecois, and Mauritian writers and artists; the reflections of and on surrealism by Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno; the relations of surrealism to the Situationist International. Throughout, the course will ask what the proliferation of “thinking surrealisms” meant to the culture and politics of modernity. All readings in English.