ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|72 pages
Alternative Modes of Knowledge
chapter 2|18 pages
The Vertiginous Pursuit of the Grand Jeu
Experimental Metaphysics, Paramnesia, and Creative Involution
chapter 4|20 pages
Occulted Un-Knowing
Bataillean Approaches to the Sacred in Gellu Naum’s Ceasornicăria Taus and Alejo Carpentier’s El Siglo de las Luces
part II|78 pages
Myth, Magic and the Search for Re-Enchantment
chapter 5|23 pages
Melusina Triumphant
Matriarchy and the Politics of Anti-Fascist Mythmaking in André Breton’s Arcane 17 (1945)
part III|74 pages
Female Artists, Gender and the Occult
chapter 9|21 pages
The Quest for the Goddess
Matriarchy, Surrealism and Gender Politics in the Work of Ithell Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington
