Article
Surrealism, Ethnography, and the Animal-Human, Introduction
Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures
(2013)
Abstract
Excerpt from the article: "In the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” from 1924, André Breton described himself and his companions in the newly formed group as having transformed themselves, “dans nos œuvres les sourds réceptacles de tant d’échos, les modestes appareils enregistreurs” (Œuvres complètes 1: 330). In this way, he established a significant equivalence between human beings and things based on the shared property of receptivity, and he began an ongoing examination of what makes humans human and whether objects could have sentience. Could objects truly have sentience—the ability to communicate with intention? Were human beings at times like technological objects? Breton pursued these questions extensively in the 1930s with his essays on objects and continued in the 1940s and 1950s with his studies of objects in his collection, specifically his transformation masks from the American Pacific Northwest Coast..."
Disciplines
Publication Date
March 13, 2013
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/00397709.2013.762850
Citation Information
Katharine Conley. "Surrealism, Ethnography, and the Animal-Human, Introduction" Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures Vol. 67 Iss. 1 (2013) p. 1 - 5 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/katharine-conley/15/