
Surrealist Ghostliness
Katharine Conley(Author)
University of Nebraska Press
Published on 1. July 2013
Book
Hardback
320 pages
978-0-8032-2659-3 (ISBN)
Description
In this study of surrealism and ghostliness, Katharine Conley provides a new, unifying theory of surrealist art and thought based on history and the paradigm of puns and anamorphosis. In Surrealist Ghostliness, Conley discusses surrealism as a movement haunted by the experience of World War I and the repressed ghost of spiritualism. From the perspective of surrealist automatism, this double haunting produced a unifying paradigm of textual and visual puns that both pervades surrealist thought and art and commemorates the surrealists' response to the Freudian unconscious. Extending the gothic imagination inherited from the eighteenth century, the surrealists inaugurated the psychological century with an exploration of ghostliness through doubles, puns, and anamorphosis, revealing through visual activation the underlying coexistence of realities as opposed as life and death.
Surrealist Ghostliness explores examples of surrealist ghostliness in film, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation art from the 1920s through the 1990s by artists from Europe and North America from the center to the periphery of the surrealist movement. Works by Man Ray, Claude Cahun, BrassaI and Salvador DalI, Lee Miller, Dorothea Tanning, Francesca Woodman, Pierre Alechinsky, and Susan Hiller illuminate the surrealist ghostliness that pervades the twentieth-century arts and compellingly unifies the century's most influential yet disparate avant-garde movement.
Surrealist Ghostliness explores examples of surrealist ghostliness in film, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation art from the 1920s through the 1990s by artists from Europe and North America from the center to the periphery of the surrealist movement. Works by Man Ray, Claude Cahun, BrassaI and Salvador DalI, Lee Miller, Dorothea Tanning, Francesca Woodman, Pierre Alechinsky, and Susan Hiller illuminate the surrealist ghostliness that pervades the twentieth-century arts and compellingly unifies the century's most influential yet disparate avant-garde movement.
Reviews / Votes
"[Surrealist Ghostliness] is an important addition to the literature on surrealism and modern art, very well written and an extremely interesting and engaging read."-Rob Harle, Leonardo Journal -- Rob Harle Leonardo Journal "Conley offers a richly argued discussion, speculative and articulate, that usefully contributes to our reading of the 'long Surrealism'."-Robert Radford, Burlington Magazine -- Robert Radford Burlington MagazineMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Lincoln
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
50 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 218 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 33 mm
Weight
544 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8032-2659-3 (9780803226593)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Katharine Conley
Surrealist Ghostliness
E-Book
04/2020
1st Edition
University of Nebraska Press
€73.99
Available for download
Person
Katharine Conley is dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the College of William & Mary and a professor of French and francophone studies and the Edward Tuck Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Emerita at Dartmouth College. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, she is the author of several books, including Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life (Nebraska, 2003) and Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism (Nebraska, 1996).
Content
List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Cinematic Whirl of Man Ray's Ghostly Objects 2. Claude Cahun's Exploration of the Autobiographical Human 3. The Ethnographic Automatism of Brassai and Dali's Involuntary Sculptures 4. The Ghostliness in Lee Miller's Egyptian Landscapes 5. Dorothea Tanning's Gothic Ghostliness 6. Francesca Woodman's Ghostly Interior Maps 7. Pierre Alechinsky's Ghostly Palimpsests 8. Susan Hiller's Freudian Ghosts Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index