Stockwell Peter. The Language of Surrealism

Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. — xiii+196 p. — (Language, Style and Literature). — ISBN 978–1–137–39221–3.The Language of Surrealism explores the revolutionary experiments in language and mind undertaken by the surrealists across Europe between the wars. Highly influential on the development of art, literary modernism, and current popular culture, surrealist style remains challenging, striking, resonant and thrilling – and the techniques by which surrealist writing achieves this are set out clearly in this book. Stockwell draws on recent work in cognitive poetics and literary linguistics to re-evaluate surrealism in its own historical setting.
In the process, the book questions later critical theoretical views of language that have distorted our ideas about both surrealism and language itself. What follows is a piece of literary criticism that is fully contextualised, historically sensitive, and textually driven, and which sets out in rich and readable detail this most intriguing and disturbing literature.Surrealist texts substantially analysed in the course of this book
Series Editors’ Note
AcknowledgementsDelineating SurrealismOrigins and Histories
Finding the edges of surrealism
Emergence and diffusion
Surrealism in the post-war period
Surrealism between the wars
Dada and presurrealism
Key features of surrealism addressed in this bookLives and Minds
Biography, history, culture
Writers of high surrealism
The pre-surrealists
The surrealists around Paris
British surrealists
Mind-modelling a surrealistLanguage in Surrealist Thought
Language and linguistics
Consciousness and the unconscious
Meaning and communicationWriting SurrealismAutomaticity
Origins of automatic writing
The first experiment: The Magnetic Fields
Refined automatism: from Mourning for Mourning to Soluble FishDissonance
From sound to sense
The semantics of paranoia
Dissonance and consonanceCollage
Collage and its adaptations
Creative and destructive dialectics
Collaging authorial intention
Accidents and emergences: objective chanceReading SurrealismCoherence
The paranoiac-critical method
Surrealist narrative
The surreal landscapeAmbience
Atmospherics of dream
Surrealist tonalities
The surreal imageImmersion
Metaphorism and literalism
Sustaining defamiliarisation
Surrealist immersion 159Diffusing SurrealismSurrealisms
Ideology and technique
Portability of style
Diffusion and significanceReferences
Index