“Discrepant Analogy:
Immanent Transpositions of Surrealism”
CALL FOR PAPERS/SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY MARCH 15, 12:00 P.M. CET
“Surréalismes Paris 2024
6th Conference of the International Society
for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS)
October 28–30, 2024 / pdf here
The 6th annual conference of ISSS follows the lead of the preceding five in charting the “dispersion and influence” of surrealism, across historical periods and global time zones. The 2024 meeting celebrates the 100th anniversary of the First Manifesto as the founding moment of an avant-garde movement that has become definitive from that time on. The present call for papers asks for work on how the foundational works of the movement may be read as immanent to works of literary or visual avant-gardes to come, particularly those that do not see themselves as primarily surrealist. In other words, it seeks a relation of “discrepant analogy” in the transformative relationship between surrealism and works in the future. As an example, Johanna Pawlik devotes a chapter on American Beat poets who reworked Breton’s Nadja, for instance in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s novel Her. In an essay that departs from the Benjaminian concept of Umfunktionierung, I read “la beauté est dans la rue” in Nadja as immanent to American Language writer Lyn Hejinian’s allegorical “call to the everyday” in her hybrid prose poem Positions of the Sun (2018). Another discrepant analogy between surrealism and later work might begin with Breton and Eluard’s attempt to imitate clinical symptoms in The Immaculate Conception with more recent poetry that gives over to madness, from Hannah Weiner’s dissociative writing to Johannes Göransson’s media-inflected dreamscapes. Between the two poles of “discrepant analogy” may occur a mediating theoretical approach (Benjamin, Foucault) or a cultural history that repositions Eurocentric surrealism in globally emergent cultural terrains. The larger point of this session will be that the productivité of surrealism is nothing if not prodigious, and is not confined solely to works that tip their hat to their oneiric forebears.
Notes and links
Send inquiries, ideas, and paper proposals to barrett.watten@gmail.com by Friday, March 15, 12:00 p.m. CET (6:00 p.m. EST).
Image: Roberto Matta, Octrui (1947)
