Avant-Garde ~ Surrealism~ Dadaism

1. Avant-Garde ~ Surrealism~ Dadaism By: Tabetha Vegas Vargas ENGG 630: Contemporary Literature Prof. Lugo

2. Objectives: To define and develop the following concepts: Dadaism Surrealism Avant-garde

3. Dada • In the early part of the twentieth century, literary and artistic reviews were the primary means by which the creative community exchanged ideas and remained in communication.

4. Journal • The journal was a vehicle for promoting emerging styles, establishing new theories, and creating a context for understanding new visual forms. These reviews played a pivotal role in forming the spirit and identity of movements such as Dada and Surrealism and served to spread their messages throughout Europe and the United States.

5. Zurich: The Birth of Dada • In February 1916, as World War I raged on, Dada came into being in Zurich in a small tavern on Spieglestrasse that became known as the Cabaret Voltaire. Founded by the German poet Hugo Ball and his companion, singer Emmy Hennings, Cabaret Voltaire soon attracted artists and writers from across Europe who fled their countries and went to neutral Zurich to escape the war.

6. Purpose • Its aim is to remind the world that there are people of independent minds—beyond war and nationalism—who live for different ideals.

7. Issue 4–5 of Dada was the final one Tzara published in Zurich.

8. Avant-Garde • The work of questioning thought. • This term, taken from French military usage designating the select corps which went out in advance of the main body of troops, is applied to the political and the cultural spheres (particularly the visual arts) to describe those individuals or groups whose ideas and work seem ahead of the times.

9. Avant-Garde • The Literature comes to define itself as writing that is more advanced that the general sensibility and linguistic practice of the age. The writer is cast in the role of explorer and path breaker, leading the way for others to follow. This being the product of a literary evolution. • Mainly introduced into poetry.

10. As both a major poet and principal publicist of modernism, Pound so successfully dominated the movement that his version of it was reproduced by academic critics as an official literary history of the period beginning in 1910 with the publication of Pound's The Spirit of Romance.

11. Surrealism • A term borrowed from Apollinaire, in André Breton's manifesto of 1924, the roots of the Surrealist movement are to be found rather earlier with the establishment in 1919.

12. Surrealism • It included the following declaration: ‘Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of the dream and in the disinterested play of thought.’ It arose out of DADA, but was more ambitious and internationally influential.

13. Like Dada, it declared the importance of the absurd, the irrational and involvement in political anarchy as a means of effecting social change. A literary as well as artistic movement, by the end of World War II it had largely disbanded as a coherent movement. A Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (Michigan, 1969)

14. Criticism of Surrealism • Feminists: Have in the past critiqued the Surrealist movement, claiming that it is fundamentally a male movement and a male fellowship. Women are often made to represent higher values and transformed into objects of desire and of mystery. • Freudian: Surrealist poems and other art works as direct manifestations of the unconscious, when they were indeed highly shaped and processed by the ego. In this view, the Surrealists may have been producing great works, but they were products of the conscious, not the unconscious mind, and they deceived themselves with regard to what they were doing with the unconscious.

15. Two Distinct Groups Emerge • The Automatists: • These artists interpreted it as referring to a suppression of consciousness in favor of the subconscious. • This group, being more focused on feeling and less analytical, understood Automatism to be the automatic way in which the images of the subconscious reach the conscience. They believed these images should not be burdened with "meaning."

16. Faithful to this interpretation, the Automatists saw the academic discipline of art as intolerant of the free expression of feeling, and felt form, which had dominated the history of art, was a culprit in that intolerance. • They believed abstractionism was the only way to bring to life the images of the subconscious. Coming from the Dada tradition, these artists also linked scandal, insult and irreverence toward the elite's with freedom. They continued to believe that lack of form was a way to rebel against them.

17. The Veristic Surrealists • Veristic Surrealists, saw academic discipline and form as the means to represent the images of the subconscious with veracity; as a way to freeze images that, if unrecorded, would easily dissolve once again into the unknown.

18. They hoped to find a way to follow the images of the subconscious until the conscience could understand their meaning. The language of the subconscious is the image, and the consciousness had to learn to decode that language so it could translate it into its own language of words.

19. Food for Thought • It would take fifty years for artists born after the Second World War to discover how right this method is for helping us all understand the architecture of the psyche. • Those who have understood the method, who have faithfully followed the images of the subconscious and, with patience, painted and analyzed them, have a lot to teach us about the make up and interaction of the three planes of the Spiritual, the psychological, and the physical.

20. Michel Leiris (1901-1990) He wrote one of the first surreal novels, Aurora (1927-8).

21. References: • http://www.fluther.com/disc/33414/what-is-dadaism/ • http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm • http://www.faqs.org/theories/St-Sy/Surrealism.html • http://www.articlearchives.com/humanities-social-science/ethnic-cultural-studies/719277-1.html • http://books.google.com.pr/books?id=pwnu_W8-yuoC&pg=PA103&lpg=PA103&dq=what+is+surrealism+literary+theory%3F&source=bl&ots=PrOR1EBtlS&sig=rEdzQ0Xhszx9nuJbbTeCCXsGrQU&hl=es&ei=t2KsSeKSKZO5twfjh4GDBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result#PPP1,M1