Sites of Surrealism

Semester and Year	FA 2012
Course Number	IDSEM-UG1709
Section	001
Instructor	Eugene Vydrin
Days	Wed
Time	6:20 PM - 9:00 PM
Units	4.0
Level	U
Foundation Requirement	HUM

Description

A flea market where one always finds what one has lost; a vanishing passage through a capital city where capitalism dreams of its own demise; a landscape riven by colonial violence whose scars speak the language of resistance. The Surrealists did not want to escape from the world but to return to it -- to reclaim reality for those whom reality drove into exile. The sites of Surrealism are as contradictory and ambivalent as the artworks that represent them: at once external and internal, strange and familiar, contemporary and archaic. In these sites, psychic and social life endlessly mirror each other, and private interiors are open to the elements of history. In this class, we will examine these contested sites in texts by André Breton, Louis Aragon, Claude Cahun, Aimé Césaire, and Julien Gracq. We will draw on the theories of Freud and Marx, both of whom influenced Surrealist thought, and on the work of Walter Benjamin, who found in Surrealism a method of reading the relics of a recent past. Sites are also places seen -- sights -- and Surrealist thought is always a way of seeing. Guided by the work of Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Mary Ann Caws, James Clifford, and Michael Taussig, we will examine Surrealist vision in painting, sculpture, and especially film and photography.

Syllabus

IDSEM-UG1709

Course Type

Interdisciplinary Seminars (IDSEM-UG)