"'J’ai été sous une multitude de formes': Jacqueline Lamba, Aube Breton Elléouët, Yves Elléouët" Mary Ann Caws Graduate School of the City University of New York Everything meets in surrealism: here, in one creative family around André Breton, there gather Brittany and Provence, painting, poetry, collages, letters and sagas. Adding to the moving witness borne from Calder to Leiris (in “réalisme transubstantié,” as he terms it), and to Yves Ellëouët’s recall of Virginia Woolf and Jean-Pierre Duprey – donc, la rencontre de la vie et de la mort – I want to add my own personal encounter over the years, haunting as it remains.
"The Before and After of André Breton's L’Amour fou: From the Collaborative to the Personal" Molly O'Brien Princeton University On May 29, 1934, André Breton met and fell in love with Jacqueline Lamba in a moment of what he describes in L'Amour fou as hasard objectif. Taken up by this powerful story, the reader may not notice that this work was once previously published as individual articles in the magazines Minotaure, Documents , and Mesures. Seen in such a fragmentary way, the work then reflects the surrealist penchant for collaboration in the production of texts that seek to reveal the hidden material of the subconscious. Taken as a whole, the fragments-made-book reflects a different desire on the part of the singular writer to show the love that he shared with Jacqueline and the events that led up to and after it as objectively as possible. In my talk, I will examine the changes made between the articles and the book L'Amour fou and what effect this produces on our reading of them. I will focus on Minotaure as the primary media outlet for the articles and the structure and collaborative element of it that shaped them. I will also look at visual and textual factors within the work as a whole and its parts, including the choice of images, their genre, their placement, and their origins. I aim to reveal the movement from the collaborative, communal, open-ended dimensions of the articles facilitated by their inclusion in Minotaure to a more personal dimension in the book that stands alone and is more determined in its structure and meaning.
"Transcontinental Surrealism: André Breton’s L’Amour fou in the Poetry of César Moro, Xavier Villaurrutia, and Enrique Molina" David Inczauskis Loyola University Chicago Surrealism crossed the Atlantic in a definitive way when the Peruvian poet César Moro traveled to Paris shortly after the publication of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. Moro is representative of Latin American writers who sought to engage with surrealism in France and return to the Americas to develop their distinctive incarnation of the artistic movement. This presentation offers a literary analysis of three poems: “Carta a Antonio” (1939) by César Moro of Perú, “Nuestro amor” (1948) by Xavier Villaurrutia of Mexico, and “Alta marea” (1961) by Enrique Molina of Argentina. These poems encapsulate the extent to which Breton’s ideas marked their creative careers. The criticism will draw from excerpts of Breton’s L’Amour fou (1937) to provide a context for the interpretation of the poems’ surrealist elements. First, the presentation will detail what is shared among all three poems and L’Amour fou. These qualities include inexhaustible sexual desire, the paradox of union and separation, the eternally vivid sexual object, and the necessity of violence in eroticism. Second, the presentation will focus on what only Moro and Breton hold in common. These characteristics include the relationship between necessity and chance, the uniquely surrealist interpretation of the divinization of the beloved, and love’s specter-like quality. The presence of these surrealist components in the writings of these American poets demonstrates the transnational character of surrealism, which owes itself to the universality of erotic desire.
