Volume 28, Number 4 · March 19, 1981
In the Museum of Strangeness
By Michael Wood
The Autobiography of Surrealism
edited by Marcel Jean
Viking, 472 pp., $30.00
From Enchantment to Rage: The Story of Surrealist Cinema
by Steven Kovács
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 297 pp., $22.50
André Breton thought that the historical success of failure of surrealism could be judged only by its efficacy in provoking a grave and generalized crise de conscience. Undoubtedly it failed in this respect, but the criterion is odd, since the vast crise de conscience known as modernity was well under way by the time of the first surrealist manifesto (1924), and in any case the surrealists could hardly provoke something of which they themselves were so plainly a symptom.
Review, 4193 words
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