Index of collaborators and table of contents of Mélusine reviews from n°1 to n°37

Since its first delivery, in 1980, Mélusine has set itself the sole and unique objective of analyzing the surrealist movement.
Such an ambition cannot be limited to the simple observation of groups gathered around André Breton, it must identify all the extensions related to their activity. This is a guarantee for perceiving the real scope of surrealism, for understanding that it constitutes a current otherwise more fertile than a simple literary dilettantism.

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Mélusine strives to multiply its approaches.

From the University of Paris III, the review naturally calls on specialists from all over France, but it reserves a notable place for collaborators from all surrealism research centers. It thus brings together a significant number of collaborators, European researchers (France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, England, Germany, Netherlands, Romania...), American (Canada, United States), Japanese...
This international character is also sensitive in the will to analyze the repercussions of surrealism wherever they are observable, both in Sweden and Egypt, both in Yugoslavia and Peru...
The same diversity is obviously manifested in the subjects addressed by the published studies. The deliveries of Mélusine are attentive to all the forms taken by surrealist practices (literature, plastic arts, photography, reviews...), to the echo that surrealism received among other avant-garde groups, in the French press or more generally in French society; of course, the great beacons of surrealism are not neglected either.

Mélusine's activity remains associated with a spirit of curiosity.

The study of a fundamental question for the approach of the surrealist movement then opens onto the Varieties or Documents sections, where unpublished texts or documents, information on ongoing research, reflections on recent publications or neglected aspects of surrealism are proposed.
Moreover, four of Mélusine's deliveries have been devoted to conference proceedings.

Mélusine is finally the "Mélusine Library".

This collection, where theses and important works are published, constitutes a natural extension of the prospecting work represented by Mélusine's annual deliveries.

The Mélusine review is available on order in all good bookstores and on the l'Age d'homme publishing site

N° 1 – EMISSION-RECEPTION, 1980, 334 p.

This first volume indicates the multiple zones open to reflection bearing on the elaboration of surrealist discourse and, at the other end of the communicative chain, on what reaches us and the way in which we perceive it.

N° 2 – OCCULT-OCCULTATION, 1981, 316 p.

"I ask for the deep, true occultation of surrealism." In echo to this injunction of André Breton, and playing on all the senses of the word, Mélusine explores this territory of the imaginary whose contours trace a fault line in the surrealist movement.

N° 3 – MARGINS NON-FRONTIERS, 1982, 302 p.

Surrounding the configuration of surrealist groups abroad, specifying the style of neighbors, marginal or dissident, without any concern for exhaustiveness, any ranking, any polemic, we intend to contribute in this issue to the determination of the invariants of surrealism.

N° 4 – THE SURREALIST BOOK, Proceedings of the Sorbonne conference (June 1981), 1983, 382 p., ill.

Is there a surrealist book or only a conglomeration of books produced by surrealists that, by metonymy, are called surrealist books (in the plural)? In other words, are there criteria allowing us to say immediately this is, this is not (a book) surrealist? This is what the studies gathered in this delivery provide an answer to.

N° 5 – POLITICS-POLEMIC, 1984, 370 p.

There are only two genres: the poem and the pamphlet" said Tristan Tzara. The political and the literary are examined as discourses, insofar as both are situated in a writing strategy where the text serves to defend ideas, propositions, at a given moment.

N° 6 – RAYMOND ROUSSEL IN GLORY, Proceedings of the Nice conference (June 1983), 1984, 350 p., ill.

Fascination, that is the word characterizing the reading of the work of the "greatest magnetizer of modern times" according to André Breton. The gathered contributions seek to deepen the reasons for such emotion, emphasizing the characters of a text that simultaneously engendered the two great tendencies of the novel of our time

N° 7 – THE GOLDEN AGE - THE AGE OF MAN, 1985, 332 p.

The golden age refers to the mythical origins of humanity at the same time as to the privileged era of childhood for the individual. How has Surrealism taken charge of this theme, remodeling it, not in a hypothetical future, but in a constantly threatened present, called the age of man

N° 8 – THE UNGRATEFUL AGE, 1986, 266 p.

Extending the previous volume, the emphasis is no longer on the mythical and utopian dimension of surrealism, but on its ethical and political aspect. A second section throws a spotlight on the year 1936, a strategic opportunity for the surrealists to measure the effectiveness of their dream of the age of man against the yardstick of practical life.

N° 9 – ARP POET PLASTICIAN, Proceedings of the Strasbourg conference (September 1986), 1987, 300 p., ill.

A constellation of studies and testimonies for the centenary of the birth of the artist who wrote: "Never will we make too much music, too much poetry, too much painting and sculpture. Never do we dream too much. The soul of music and that of poetry, of painting and sculpture merge, flow together like dreams."

N° 10 – LOVE - HUMOR, 1988, 286 p.

Two key concepts of surrealism. They presided over its birth. Constantly, it questions them, particularly at the moment when man feels most threatened individually and collectively. Two means of access to surreality. What would life, true life, be without love and without humor? Like poetry, love-humor illuminates the future.

N° 11 – HISTORY - HISTORIOGRAPHY, 1990, 314 p.

The originality of works held as interrogations on the specific forms and figures taken, in surrealism, among surrealists, by the relations between text and image, between readable and visible; it examines the place that this readable-visible couple holds in the surrealist project, indissolubly aesthetic and ethical, and the validity of these "fundamental data."

N° 12 – READABLE - VISIBLE

This issue is an interrogation on the specific forms and figures taken, in surrealism, among surrealists, by the relations between text and image, between readable and visible; it examines the place that this readable-visible couple holds in the surrealist project, indissolubly aesthetic and ethical, and the validity of these "fundamental data."

N° 13 – THE SURREALIST AND HIS Ψ, 1992, 330 p.

A particularity of surrealism, at the heart of the avant-gardes, lies in the relationship it establishes between psychoanalysis and "poetry" to which it assigns a cognitive finality, that of the exploration of the self and its relationship to the world. However, the surrealists approach the field of the psyche less as doctrinaires than as creators, choosing, transforming certain concepts according to their own quest.

N° 14 – SURREALIST EUROPE, Contributions to the Strasbourg conference (Sept. 1992), 1994, 342 p., ill.

Just as it refused to be only a literary and/or artistic movement among others, surrealism erased geographical, political and cultural borders to manifest itself throughout Europe (with the significant exception of Soviet Russia). The taking into account, the putting into action of the values (or counter-values) promoted or revived by surrealism, according, it is true sometimes, to modalities proper to such and such a country, leads to identifying the contours of a surrealist Europe, which perhaps still exists today.

N° 15 – SHADOW PROJECTED, SURREALISM IN HUNGARY, 1995, 362 p., ill.

For its fifteenth appearance, Mélusine intends to explore the traces of surrealism in Hungary, giving voice to numerous foreign researchers. This is not to say that surrealism can annex a new province, through which it has only transited. But the charismatic figure of Lajos Kassak made Budapest, even before the birth of surrealism, one of the crossroads of European avant-gardes. André Breton did not go there; the Hungarians did not form a structured surrealist group. Nevertheless, surrealism exerted, in its multiple aspects, a primordial influence, stimulating a first-rate theoretical, artistic and literary production.
Avoiding the double danger of excessive purism (which would tend to prove that there was never surrealism in Hungary on the pretext that the term was not used) and a very broad ecumenism, bringing all avant-garde explorations back to this unique movement, this volume brings a new look, freed from the Stalinist veil, and makes emerge works and texts long occulted, thus contributing to a true "intelligence of Europe."

N° 16 – CULTURES - COUNTER-CULTURES, 1996, 432 p. ill.

The central dossier of this volume addresses the relationships of surrealism with so-called "primitive" thought, popular culture, esoteric tradition, shamanism, classical culture. We will see how, standing up against the constraining forces of the past, it managed to trace the essential lines of a counter-culture, at work in the present.
Moreover, the "Variety" section welcomes ongoing studies and the presentation of recent work on Yves Bonnefoy, Léonora Carrington, Georges Henein, René Char, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Fernando Arrabal, Benjamin Péret, the methodology of computerized research, etc.
Finally come the "Critical Reflections" on recently published works, documentation (directory of registered and defended theses) and a bibliography.

N° 17 – CROSSING TZARA-BRETON, Contributions to the Paris conference (May 1996), 1997, 347 p.

On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of these two poets, founders of the two most important literary, artistic and moral movements of the 20th century, the speakers questioned their crossed paths. They attempted to justify the title of the conference on all levels: poetic, aesthetic, political, biographical... Finally, they showed how their divergences and convergences, far from being occasional or passionate, still have today a repercussion on the theories of modernity and what follows. The main experts, French or foreign, of the domain or the envisaged authors, therefore confronted their methods and their experiences (psychocriticism, poetics of rhythm, history of ideas and intellectuals, analysis of the imaginary, aestheticians and art historians etc.) on complete works now accessible and, more so, on exemplary trajectories.

N° 18 – Maxime Alexandre, a surrealist without hearth or home. Studies gathered by Aimée Bleikasten with the collaboration of Henri Béhar. 1998, 336 p.

"Without hearth or home," this is how Maxime Alexandre defines himself in his Memoirs of a Surrealist. For this eternal vagabond, surrealism was only a stage whose importance this volume strives to show for his work. After which are successively addressed the long friendship, rich in vicissitudes, that linked Alexandre and Aragon, the difficult bilingualism of the Alsatian poet, his quest for God between Judaism and Catholicism, finally his relationship with his friend Jean Arp.

N° 19 – Mexico, magnetic mirror. Studies gathered by Henri Béhar. 1999, 400 p.

Mexico was a "magnetic mirror of surrealism," affirmed Octavio Paz. Between Antonin Artaud's first contact with Mexican soil in 1936, soon followed by André Breton's stay, and Benjamin Péret's return to Paris in 1948, European surrealists found in Mexico not only a land of exile, encounters, myths and revolutions, but also a privileged space favoring both individual experiences and collective adventure.
From Cesar Moro, the Peruvian artisan of the great Mexico exhibition, to the great figures of Mexican cultural life Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, from Remedios Varo to Wolfgang Paalen, from Luis Buñuel to Octavio Paz, from declarations to positions, from travels to studies, from reviews to exhibitions, all surrealist activity contributes to making Mexico a living matter and a singular stage in the construction of its imaginary.
However, many works conceived in Mexico would not have been different, it seems, if their authors had lived elsewhere. The original myths of Mexico appear more clearly in the plastic arts than in surrealist texts. And, if numerous Mexican artists declared themselves surrealists, the belonging of their creations to the movement is often contested. The influence that Mexico really exerted on surrealist creation, as much as the hold of surrealism on Mexican creators, needs to be better defined. A good reason to revisit Mexico.

N° 20– "Marvelous and surrealism" , 352 p.

The present volume explores the different degrees of the real and the surreal, of realism and surrealism, their contradictions too, in the literary and artistic production of the movement. A caustic and salutary revision of a surrealism too often presented as the exclusive enemy of realism without seeing the utopian project it nourished.

N° 21 – "Realism - Surrealism"

Who doesn't know by heart this phrase of Breton in Nadja: "For me, I will continue to inhabit my glass house, where one can see at any hour who comes to visit me, where everything that is suspended from the ceilings and walls holds as if by enchantment, where I rest at night on a glass bed with glass sheets, where who I am will appear to me sooner or later engraved in diamond." Shouldn't we bring it closer to this dream of a composition "of the idea so true, so naked, that it appeared transparent to itself, and of a diamond solidity in the crystal of the pen" formulated by... Zola (in a letter to his friend Valabrègue, in 1864)?
Following the surrealists too quickly, criticism has often been content to take up their grievances against the previous Schools, without seeing the utopian project they nourished. The time has come to say the part of the real in the surreal, of realism in surrealism, and vice versa.
In its primary sense, surrealism is a realism that refuses to stick to "summary realities," that knows, explores or plans to explore territories of the real whose interest or existence vulgar realism contests. In this sense, surrealist must be understood as the adjective "surfins" of canned goods: "surfins" peas are finer than so-called "fins" peas. When a scholar and academician, responding to an inquiry, reduced love to the sexual act, he showed realism; whoever believes that love exists, in the sense that poets give to the word, is surrealist.
Surrealism, in continuity with the above meaning, "fights so that man reaches a knowledge forever perfectible of himself and the universe" (B. Péret). It proposes to successive generations to attempt the resolution of the antinomies against which the spirit comes up against: dream and reality, present and past, etc." (Jehan Mayoux, "André Breton and surrealism", 15.12.66)
Inspired by these enlightening remarks, the present volume therefore explores the different degrees of the real and the surreal, of realism and surrealism, their contradiction too, in the literary and artistic production of the movement, as, by feedback, it shows surrealism in the germinative state of previous works. A caustic and salutary revision.

N° 22– "René Crevel or the spirit against reason", 2002, 320 p.

It is a complex being, suffering terribly in his flesh, extraordinarily faithful in friendship, harshly clear-sighted in his admirations, rejecting with all his soul the world as it is to believe only in love, poetry and freedom, sometimes going astray in exhausting liaisons, always getting lost in the same quest for the absolute, who affirms himself throughout these pages.

N°23 – INSIDE - OUTSIDE, 2003, 342 p.

"Inside-Outside" attempts to understand the relationships that the surrealist group maintained with individuals who could be at its center or on its periphery. How indeed to understand the admonitions launched from inside and outside the movement? Why did certain members leave the group, while others, on the contrary, were sensitive to its force of attraction? What is the very nature of the surrealist movement and its limits? It is no longer only a socio-historical question that is posed in this work, but more generally an ethical as well as aesthetic problem, that of adherence to a surrealist morality and the artistic principles that derive from it.

N° 24 – THE SURREALISTS' CINEMA, 2004, 342 p.

The surrealists are the age of cinema. Growing up with it, they are above all cinephages. Everything in cinema was made for them to agree with joy. And yet, they were not long in declaring themselves "robbed as in a wood." Taking up this dossier afresh, the present volume questions certain cinematographic productions of the surrealists: The Shell and the Clergyman (Artaud), The Pearl (Hugnet), The Golden Age (Buñuel and Dali); on their unturned scenarios; on the surrealist aesthetics undoubtedly at work in other films produced outside the movement, on their avowed or unavowed posterity.

N° 25 – THE UNIVERSAL REPORTAGE, 2005, 304 p.

This dossier aims to rediscover the dissident trajectories of surrealism. It also questions the role of journalism within as well as on the margins of surrealism. Must surrealism and journalism necessarily be perceived contradictorily? Can't one be surrealist in the practice of the newspaper? And conversely, does something pass from the article to the work? If there were nothing, the journalistic activity could not be held for "null," insofar as it touches on the notion of commitment, the links of dream and action, as well as the question of realism, networks of sociability outside the group, in short, the real life of the actors of the movement: so many essential incidences when it comes to "situating" surrealism on the chessboard of literary and media modernity.

N°26 – METAMORPHOSES, 2006, 348p.

Everything is fluctuating, everything obeys the law of change, life by essence is movement. The mythical figures in perpetual metamorphosis have always had the vocation to tell, since the origins, the universal transformation. This is what Ovid was already doing. Can there be a modern mythology? Surrealism seems to answer in the affirmative, it who makes metamorphosis the very principle of "surreality." In quest of the marvelous everyday, of the marvelous in the city ("Paris, modern myth," said Caillois), it aims to operate a radical transformation of sensibility, of the imaginary and of life. Daily life becomes magical again. the poet gives a new framework to the sacred: spectral figures of the "Great Transparents," chimerical creatures: reactivation of the legend of Mélusine, who, at once fish, serpent and bird, represents the fusion of opposites. Hybrids, crystallizations, grafts. Journey in the lunar landscapes of the after-death for René Daumal. The surrealists invent a whole bestiary, a whole erotic "feminine": Bellmer's dolls, Molinier's mannequins, Toyen's panther-women, Max Ernst's bird-men, Hérold's crystallized naked women. Modern? They want to be, they are. they who assign themselves the task of "the elaboration of the collective myth proper to our era" (A. Breton). And who integrate into their research the infinite possibilities offered by photography and cinema. If there is a common point between all these artists, poets or plasticians, it is well to believe that art is mediumistic, that it transfigures appearances, that it transforms reality. Through metamorphosis. the legendary past joins the visionary future of utopia.

N° 27–SURREALISM AND SCIENCE, 2007, 322 p.

The history that will be read in this dossier begins with the meeting at the Val-de-Grâce, around a dissection table, of two medical students, poets in their time. Surrealism would not have taken the orientation that we know it, notably in its relationships with science, if two of its main animators, Aragon and Breton, had not themselves practiced medicine in wartime and, because they had a poet's complexion, had not come out of it with intense frustrations...

N° 28–SURREALISM AS HERITAGE: THE AVANT-GARDES AFTER 1945, 2008, 322 p.

"Surrealism, however, has its statue, its gods and its mythology, its cross-of-fire and its legend, its recipes and its dogmas, its patois, and nothing is easier, for collectors, than to measure it to within a centimeter: statues are the most docile of corpses." (Dotremont) – "in occultism or alchemy, Breton only proposed insignificant chatter of under-"blower" or under-"non-initiate"; in political economy, he only produced invertebrate under-trotskyism." (Isou) – "Breton, today it's bankruptcy. Your enterprise has been deficit for too long. It's decidedly not your associates who will get you out of there. They don't even know how to behave at table." (Internationale Lettriste) – "Themselves, the Unconscious of the Great Thing, survive in the anodyne, in the good humor of banalized amusements towards (Guy Debord) – "What a pain their literary salon is!" (Topor) – "For surrealism, Lautréamont remains a pretext for verbal inflation, a reference all the more insistent as it is less questioned, a shadow, an expression, a myth, under the cover of which a lyrical, moral and psychological confusionism is perpetuated." (Philippe Sollers) – "And what about the little tails of the surrealist comet: junk of images, desperately interchangeable dreams, libertarian clichés, painful puns, riquiqui sublimities of eros?" (Christian Prigent)

N°29, SURREALISM WITHOUT ARCHITECTURE. 2009, 332 p.

"Surrealism without painting": thus was entitled, in 1973, an exhibition by Marcel Mariën. And it is in a similar spirit that one will read the title of the present collection. For of surrealist architecture, there is none, or so little that the subject would be quickly closed. Paradoxically, it is perhaps through this very absence that surrealism finds its place in architecture. Fervent promoters of imagination against the real, of revolt against edification, the surrealists will nevertheless, through their imaginary elaborations, have posed a horizon which, a posteriori, appears as the perfect negative of architectural modernism. They will still, through their elective gaze, have established a sort of counter-architectural tradition, but it also goes back much further into the past. The weight of this tradition, the momentum towards this utopia will thus have founded a true architectural exigency, which was to accompany the progressive exit of architecture from modernist canons. Welcoming architects, literary people as well as art historians, this volume addresses both the surrealist approach to architecture proper (by Breton, Tzara, Bataille...) and the presence of architecture in literature or painting (De Chirico, Gracq, Magritte, Malkine, Mandiargues...), even in cinema, without forgetting architectural projects as such (Matta, Kiesler, Marcel Jean, Doumayrou...). Attentive to architecture seen by the surrealists, it finally stops on the movement's heritage at the heart of architecture, up to the most contemporary perspectives (Internationale Situationniste, Tschumi, Spuybroek...).

N°30, SERBIAN SURREALISTS. 2010, 332 p.

In Paris, a Serbian surrealist group is announced as early as autumn 1925 by Benjamin Péret. A close collaboration is established between the members of the French and Belgrade groups. These appear quite naturally in La Révolution surréaliste, then Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, while the Parisians collaborate in the publications of the movement founded in Belgrade: Nemoguće – The Impossible 1930 and Nadrealisam danas i ovde [Surrealism today and here]. The poetic project exposed in all these reviews suits perfectly all those who collaborate there, in Paris as in Belgrade. With this difference that through their inquiries on dialectics, desire, humor, etc., the Yugoslavs emphasize problems sketched elsewhere. Their manifestos are in unison, and their poetic or plastic works join the same themes. These subjects and concepts are the basis of the typological unity of surrealism, shared between experimentation on the irrational and social action. During these few years of collective fervor (1925-1932), the Belgrade movement was one with the Paris movement. The same historical causes destroyed Serbian collective activity and led to the split of the French movement, whose consequences will remain lasting.

N°31, THE NETWORKS OF SURREALISM. 2011, 336 p.

The irruption of social networks in the contemporary universe of the worldwide web makes us aware of the role of individuals or these more or less formal organizations that helped establish and maintain surrealism in the universal consciousness of readers and art lovers. If surrealism continues today through different groupings, if it survives through reading, exhibitions, resounding sales, a flourishing activity on the Internet, this is not due to chance. The time has come to study very closely how surrealism managed to impose itself in different milieus, constitute support networks in apparently the most hostile spaces, and make itself appreciated beyond borders. In short, who are the publishers, newspapers, actors, directors, producers, patrons, gallery owners, politicians, plasticians, the poets themselves who have managed to weave such an effective network around the world that it still lasts. Who are these readers, these lovers of surrealism? how do they recognize each other? do they form a coherent collectivity? Let's go further: does school, today, contribute to transmitting the understanding, even the love of the surrealist thing? this is what our dossier attempts to answer. Text by Jacques Baron: The Standing Travelers. Unpublished correspondences of Aragon, Jacques Baron, André Breton, Nicolas Calas, Boris Souvarine.

N°32, TO BEAUTIFUL HANDS Surrealist Book – Artist's Book 2012, 338 p.

Hybrid genre par excellence, space of innovation and experimentation through at least two distinct practices, the so-called surrealist book and the contemporary artist's book constitute, each in their own way, a veritable paradigm shift in the practice of the illustrated book dear to the 19th century. Both welcome text and image, make dialogue – by collision or collusion – two modes of representation. They suppose, by this fact, a new type of reader metamorphosed into reading-looking. On the other hand, the book object is perceived as an object of investigation of crossed gazes: between the writer and the artist, between words and images, between the book and the reader. The encounter with the other creator, with the other in oneself, poses a series of questions addressed here from different points of view. How is the sharing of space effected (of the page, of the double page, of the book)? How to impose one's voice, one's vision while respecting limits and thresholds so as not to encroach too much on the other's terrain? What relationships does collaboration arouse in creators? To what iconotextual regime do these books obey that are born under the pen of authors and through the eye of visual artists? In the wake of these questions, what attitude should the reader adopt in the face of these books that present themselves to him as reconfigured objects? Contributions by: Elza ADAMOW ICZ, Marc AUFRAISE, Marcella Biserni, Eddie Breuil, Georgiana Colvile, Doris Eibl, Constanze Fritzsch, Marc Kober, Caroline Lebrec, Jacques Leenhardt, Sophie Lemaître, Sergio Lima, Raluca Lupu-Onet, Danièle Méaux, Emmanuelle Pelard, Michel Pierssens, Virginie Pouzet-Duzer, Annie Richard, Julien Schuh and Alexander Streitberger. Variety by: Delphine Bière, Petrişor Militaru, Richard Spiteri. Unpublished documents on André Breton, Nicolas Calas, René Crevel, Maurice Fourré, presented by: Bruno Duval, Dimitri Kravvaris and Stephen Steele.

N°33, FEMININE SELF-REPRESENTATION, 2013, 333 p.

For its thirty-third appearance, Mélusine changes layout. It offers itself an illustration booklet and is composed mainly of three dossiers. The first, starting from the observation that women artists distinguish themselves from their companions of the same surrealist group by the primordial place they accord to self-portrait, is devoted to the in-depth analysis of the narcissistic mirror that constitute their texts and works of art. In search of answers to the subject of their representative obsession, we dig into their origins, their social situation, their equivocal and ambiguous role as surrealists. A second dossier pays homage to Leonora Carrington, on the day after her death in Mexico on May 25, 2011, by evoking the woman and artist she was. A third set, based on the interventions of a recent conference held in Lyon, recalls, more than his detached personality, the work of Stanislas Rodanski, opening to loss of sight of untimely perspectives, forward, beyond-earth. An unnoticed narrative by Joyce Mansour opens the last section which exceptionally groups the usual sections: "Variety", "Documents" and "Critical Reflections". Contributions by: Susan Aberth, Léonor De Abreu, Dawn Ades, Patricia Allmer, Teresa Arcq, Chloé Aridjis, Mary Ann Caws, Whitney Chadwick, Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Georgiana Colvile, Katharine Conley, Benoît Delaune, Jonathan Eburne, Maria José Gonzalez, Thomas Guillemin, Gaëlle Hourdin, Leila Jarbouai, Marc Jimenez, Dominique Jourdain, Marc Kober, Joyce Mansour, Bernard McGuirk, Danièle Méaux, Martine Monteau, Raphaël Neuville, Andrea Oberhuber, Sibylle Pieyre De Mandiargues, Françoise Py, Jean-François Rabain, Annie Richard, Alba Romano- Pace, Francesca Rondinelli, Richard Spiteri, Modesta Suarès, Vincent Teixeira, Gayle Zachmann. Illustrations by: Myriam Bat-Yossef, Bona, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Adrien Dax, Maria Izquierdo, Jacqueline Lamba, Isabel Meyrelles, Lee Miller, Kay Sage, Alice Rahon, Rosa Rolanda, Virginia Tentindo.

N° 34, SURREALISM AND PERFORMING ARTS

The exegesis of surrealism concentrates essentially on literature and on the visual arts, whereas this cultural current, the most innovative of the 20th century, has successfully fertilized other modes of expression. The present dossier testifies to this: it deals with theater as a scenic art as much as a literary genre, and with other performing arts. Convocating various approaches, it brings together two professions that too often ignore each other: university critics (dramaturges, theatrologists or specialists of surrealism) and practitioners of the stage. Before coming to historical surrealism, the first third of the dossier goes back to previous centuries, both to illuminate the thought of Breton's group and to return to its aesthetic sources, in matters of representation. The last two thirds are situated downstream of the current and extend to the extreme contemporary, while covering a territory that embraces Europe and North America – which attests to the scope of the surrealist stage's influence. The vast domain of spectacle has accomplished reforms for about a hundred years, which bear fruit. Several present affinities with surrealism. Emerging practices stand out as a path that the latter had sown, where it regenerates under unprecedented forms. In short, the scenic fortune of the movement guarantees it a perpetual renewal.

N°35 – Eros is life!

Sarane Alexandrian called for an in-depth study of surrealism's eroticism: "Basically, this consists in clarifying these questions: who, in surrealism, spoke of eroticism? When and how was it spoken of? What influence did works of this genre have on the evolution of the movement?"

N°36 – Masculine/feminine, surrealism in Japan

"I would like to be able to change sex like changing shirts." Simple quip on Breton's part? The fact remains that in the surrealism of the interwar years, masculine-feminine relationships as well as the concepts of femininity and masculinity are characterized by ambiguity (retrenchment and search), oscillation (the game of exchanges), transgression (the beyond of the body), becoming (Cahun's self-indefining), fusion, even confusion.

N°37- The Gold of Time, André Breton, fifty years after

Fifty years after what? After the famous Cerisy decade. After his death, while his presence manifests itself as current as can be. Far from drawing up the chronicle of manifestations or the bibliography of works that have been devoted to him since 1966, the contributions gathered here attempt to identify the reasons and means of this persistent notoriety, both through the ideas he put in place, the form and aesthetics of his expression, the theoretical and practical displacements to which he proceeded on the knowledge and art of his time.