ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the nature of stylistics as a contextualised and contextualising activity, based on principles set out in Peter Verdonk’s series. Surrealism is often described as a narrative with sources, influences and parent-figures in late nineteenth century French symbolism, early century fauvism, and First World War Dadaism. There are often chronologies of key events in the history of surrealism and the critical material is loaded with names and places and dates and times all associated with the period of production of surrealist texts. The pragmatic technique of working back and forth from text to linguistics serves to create a process of contextualizing, in order to avoid the trap of text-context binarism. The syntactic form and the non-use of a comma encourage a readerly construction of identity across the elements, and the blend between plesionymy and non-synonymy can only lead such an interpretation into unreality.
