Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse (Cambridge Studies in French, Series Number 56) - Hardcover

Adamowicz, Elza

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521592046 ISBN 13: 9780521592048

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Elza Adamowicz presents an analysis of surrealist collage, both as a technique of cutting and pasting ready made material, and as a subversive and creative strategy. She considers verbal collage, pictorial collage, and the hybrids they generate, and discusses the works of Max Ernst and André Breton, as well as those of Aragon, Brunius, Eluard, Hugnet, Magritte, Péret, Styrsky and others. Focusing on the recycling of art-historical icons, the parodic reworking of narrative clichés, the concept of defamiliarisation of the banal, or the relations between part bodies and totalities, she offers close readings of individual collages, and links specific aspects of collage practice to central issues of surrealist aesthetic and political thought. Throughout this well illustrated study Adamowicz confronts the 'monstrous' nature of collage, grounded on excess and composed of irretrievable fragments and hovering signs.

About this title

Review

"Here Elza Adamowicz offers an interestingly analyzed study of the various techniques of cutting, assembling, and pasting the parts that go to make up the kinds of collage, visual and verbal, constructed in surrealism, and...in dada before it. She is particularly good at the discussion of the subversive undermining of established narratives' and of organic wholes by the processes of substitution and displacement, ' the theoretical background for it, and the individual exmaples adduced to support her statements." Mary Ann Caws, L'Esprit Createur

Book Description

This book offers a new analysis of Surrealist collage, both as a technique of cutting and pasting ready made material, and as a subversive and creative strategy. Illustrating many of the collages under discussion, it offers close readings of individual collages and proposes a radical reassessment of Surrealism.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521592046
• ISBN 13: 9780521592048
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264