Amalia Cotoi Modernism and Surrealism. An Inquiry into the World of Modern(ist) Objects

Regarded as distinct phenomena during the 20th century, with one operating within the bourgeois framework and the other existing outside it, as the epitome of anti-bourgeois art, modernism and the avant-garde have become increasingly interconnected and even juxtaposed in recent decades. If today modernism and the avant-garde are perceived as two artistic movements that 'broke away from mimetic standards typically associated with historical referentiality', as noted by Jean-Michel Rabaté and Angeliki Spiropoulou in the introduction of Historical Modernisms: Time, History, and Modernist Aesthetics (2022: 17), one of the primary reasons is the concerted effort of contemporary criticism to investigate the integration of literature into the world. This endeavor follows a historical turn in literary studies and coincides with the emergence of new materialism in humanities and social sciences.

Drawing on principles of new materialism, situated at the confluence of flat aesthetics and ecocriticism, which revisits Hegel to establish equity between subject and object, my paper aims to explore the interplay between modernism and surrealism. This exploration focuses on both the agency of the modern object and the significance attributed to it, as well as the responsibility of the modern subject in revealing the 'truth' of both the unconscious and 'the meaning that was accorded to things', in Robert Short’s terms (Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, 1976: 302). Beginning with Crisis of the Object, André Breton's text written for the first Surrealist Exhibition of Objects in 1936, my paper will delve into the works of canonical writers such as Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka, as well as peripheral writers like Urmuz and Max Blecher. I aim to investigate whether surrealism and the avant-garde are interconnected through the relationships they establish between subject and object, and whether this relationship could indicate an anti-anthropocentric poetics.

Amalia Cotoi. Assistant Professor at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. She has recently edited a special issue on modernism and Bruno Latour for Philobiblon Transylvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Humanities (2023), and she is currently working on a special issue titled 'Integrated Modernisms', to be published in Echinox Journal in 2024. Her research interests encompass modernism, modernist literature, memory, ecocriticism, critical theory, and contemporary novel.