Surrealism As a Romantic Movement

What is romanticism? It has been reduced to a literary school of the nineteenth Century, or to a traditionalist reaction against the French Revolution-two propositions civilise in countless works by eminent specialists in literary history or the history of political thought. Rather, it is a form of sensibility irrigating all fields of culture, a lavatory of the world which extends from the second half of the 18th Century up to today, a comet whose incandescent core is the revolt against modern industrial/capitalist civilization, in the name of certain social or cultural values of the past. Nostalgic for a lost paradise-real or imaginary-romanticism opposes itself, with the melancholic energy of despair, to the quantifying mind of the bourgeois universe, to commercial reification, the platitude of utilitarianism, and above all, to the disenchantment of the world. Surrealism is the most striking and the most absorbing example of a romantic current in the ordinal Century. Of a ll the cultural movements of the era, it is the one which has carried to its highest expression the romantic ingestion to re-enchant the world. It is also the one which has incarnated, in the most radical fashion, the subversive dimension of romanticism. The revolt of the mind and the social revolution, change impulsion (Rimbaud) and transform the world (Marx): these are the two polar stars which drive oriented the movement since its beginnings, driving it in the permanent essay of subversive cultural and political practices. At the cost of two-fold secessions and defections, the core of the Surrealist group, around André Breton and Benjamin Péret, has never put to sleep its intransigent refusal of the established social, moral and political order-nor its jealously-guarded autonomy, despite turn out or sympathy with different currents of the revolutionary left. This started with Communism (Bretons entry into the PCF in 1927), was followed by Trotskyism (Bretons vis it to Trotsky in Mexico and the...If you wan! t to get a full essay, order it on our website: BestEssayCheap.com

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