Full Description
This volume examines the relationship between occultism and Surrealism, specifically exploring the reception and appropriation of occult thought, motifs, tropes and techniques by Surrealist artists and writers in Europe and the Americas, from the 1920s through the 1960s. Its central focus is the specific use of occultism as a site of political and social resistance, ideological contestation, subversion and revolution. Additional focus is placed on the ways occultism was implicated in Surrealist discourses on identity, gender, sexuality, utopianism and radicalism.
Contents
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
List of Plates
List of Illustrations
Introduction: In Search of the Marvellous
Tessel M. Bauduin, Victoria Ferentinou and Daniel Zamani
Part I: Alternative Modes of Knowledge
1 Spiritual Surrealists: Séances, Automatism, and the Creative Unconscious
Claudie Massicotte
2 The Vertiginous Pursuit of the Grand Jeu: Experimental Metaphysics, Paramnesia, and Creative Involution
Donna Roberts
3 Palmistry as Portraiture: Dr. Charlotte Wolff and the Surrealists
M. E. Warlick
4 Occulted Un-Knowing: Bataillean Approaches to the Sacred in Gellu Naum's Ceasornicãria Taus and Alejo Carpentier's El Siglo de las Luces
Vivienne Brough-Evans
Part II: Myth, Magic and the Search for Re-Enchantment
5 Melusina Triumphant: Matriarchy and the Politics of Anti-Fascist Mythmaking in André Breton's Arcane 17
Daniel Zamani
6 Esotericism and Surrealist Cinema: Wilhelm Freddie's Films and the New Myth
Kristoffer Noheden
7 Disenchanted Ground, or Antonin Artaud, Vincent van Gogh and Magic in 1947
Gavin Parkinson
8 Kurt Seligmann, Surrealism and the Occult
Gražina Subelytė
Part III: Female Artists, Gender and the Occult
9 The Quest for the Goddess: Matriarchy, Surrealism and Gender Politics in the Work of Ithell Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington
Victoria Ferentinou
10 On the True Exercise of Witchcraft in the Work of Remedios Varo
María José González Madrid
11 Clear Dreaming: Maya Deren, Surrealism and Magic
Judith Noble
12 Harbingers of the New Age: Surrealism, Women and the Occult in the United States
Susan Aberth
Bibliography
