Peter De Vries and Surrealism

Voorkant
Bucknell University Press, 1995 - 240 pagina's
Peter De Vries and Surrealism rereads De Vries in the light of surrealism and argues that the novelist and poet devised a new comic form, surrealist farce. De Vries's style and narrative technique are often surrealistic, and he mentions surrealism and surrealists in all but two of his twenty-six books. Yet, in fifty years of commentary on De Vries, scarcely any notice has been taken of these surrealist elements. This study moves from literary biography and historiography, which establish De Vries's points of contact with surrealism, through textual analysis, which traces De Vries's working through modernism toward surrealism in his early writing, to a consideration of De Vries's mature works that takes into account their surrealist aspects and allusions.

Vanuit het boek

Inhoudsopgave

Introduction
15
The Literary Life of Peter De Vries
26
Peter De Vries and 1930s Surrealism
60
A Reading of But Who Wakes the Bugler?
87
Surrealizations The Unofficial Career of Peter De Vries
131
In The Extravagant Vein in American Humor
166
Notes
184
Works Cited
214
Index
229
Copyright

Overige edities - Alles bekijken

Veelvoorkomende woorden en zinsdelen

Populaire passages

Pagina 137 - I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.
Pagina 94 - When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain; A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day.
Pagina 129 - He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.
Pagina 6 - I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.
Pagina 31 - ... bringest an assuaging balm — eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away •the purposes of wrath...
Pagina 31 - O just, subtle, and all-conquering opium! that, to the hearts of rich and poor alike, for the wounds that •will never heal, and for the pangs of grief that "tempt the spirit to rebel," bringest an assuaging balm — eloquent opium!
Pagina 85 - ... explicable is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life, which he worships, with coarse but sincere rites. The inwardness and mystery of this attachment drive men of every class to the use of emblems.
Pagina 19 - In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is only another name for lameness. It is the untamed, uncivilized, free and wild thinking in Hamlet, in the Iliad, and in all the scriptures and mythologies that delights us, — not learned in the schools, not refined and polished by art. A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive...
Pagina 81 - Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.

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