Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Its intention was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality. It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media as well.
Stéphane Mallarmé, pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism.
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".
André Robert Breton was a French writer and poet, the co-founder, leader, and principal theorist of surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism".
Jean Genet was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. In his early life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later became a writer and playwright. His major works include the novels The Thief's Journal and Our Lady of the Flowers and the plays The Balcony, The Maids and The Screens.
Hélène Cixous is a French writer, playwright and literary critic. During her academic career, she was primarily associated with the Centre universitaire de Vincennes, which she co-founded in 1969 and where she created the first centre of women's studies at a European university. Known for her experimental writing style and great versatility as a writer and thinker, she has written more than seventy books dealing with multiple genres: theatre, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction.
Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille was a French philosopher and intellectual working in philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, and history of art. His writing, which included essays, novels, and poetry, explored such subjects as eroticism, mysticism, surrealism, and transgression. His work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including poststructuralism.
Antoine Marie Joseph Paul Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud, was a French artist who worked across a variety of media. He is best known for his writings, as well as his work in the theatre and cinema. Widely recognized as a major figure of the European avant-garde, he had a particularly strong influence on twentieth-century theatre through his conceptualization of the Theatre of Cruelty. Known for his raw, surreal and transgressive work, his texts explored themes from the cosmologies of ancient cultures, philosophy, the occult, mysticism and indigenous Mexican and Balinese practices.
André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist.
Robert Desnos was a French poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement.
Jean-Luc Nancy was a French philosopher. Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre, a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nancy is the author of works on many thinkers, including La remarque spéculative in 1973 on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Le Discours de la syncope (1976) and L'Impératif catégorique (1983) on Immanuel Kant, Ego sum (1979) on René Descartes, and Le Partage des voix (1982) on Martin Heidegger.
Francis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French poet. He developed a form of prose poem, minutely examining everyday objects. He was the third recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1974.
The following is a bibliography of works by Jacques Derrida.
What Is Literature?, also published as Literature and Existentialism, is an essay by French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, published by Gallimard in 1948. Initially published in freestanding essays across French literary journals Les Temps modernes, Situations I and Situations II, essays "What Is Writing?" and "Why Write?" were translated into English and published by the Paris-based literary journal Transition 1948. The English translation by Bernard Frechtman was published in 1950.
The Theatre and Its Double is a 1938 collection of essays by French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud. It contains his most famous works on the theatre, including his manifestos for a Theatre of Cruelty.
Guy Bennett, is an American writer and translator. He lives in Los Angeles.
Claude Esteban was a French poet.
Helen Weaver was an American writer and translator. She translated over fifty books from French. Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings was a Finalist for the National Book Award in translation in 1977.
"Cogito and the History of Madness" is a 1963 paper by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida that critically responds to Michel Foucault's book History of Madness. In this paper, Derrida questions the intentions and feasibility of Foucault's book, particularly in relation to the historical importance attributed by Foucault to the treatment of madness by Descartes in the Meditations on First Philosophy. Derrida's paper began a high-profile exchange between Derrida and Foucault as well as a considerable amount of attention from scholars. Foucault responded directly to Derrida in an appendix added to the 1972 edition of the History of Madness titled "My body, this paper, this fire." Derrida again considered Foucault's 1961 text on madness with "To do Justice to Freud: The History of madness in the age of psychoanalysis" in 1991. The exchange between Derrida and Foucault was sometimes acrimonious and it is said that "the two writers stopped communicating for ten years." Commentators on the exchange include Shoshana Felman, Gayatri Spivak, Geoffrey Bennington, Slavoj Žižek, Edward Saïd, Rémi Brague, Manfred Frank, and Christopher Norris.
Marc Dachy was a French art historian whose speciality was Dadaism and Surrealism, an art curator, a translator, lecturer and publisher. The Prix des Créateurs was awarded to Dachy in 1978 by Eugène Ionesco.
