Consuming surrealism: Andre Breton in the twenties.

The dissertation approaches Breton's work in the twenties from a reader-response perspective and develops a theory of reading as consumption. In reader-oriented literary studies, critics tend to locate power with either the reader or the text. Breton seems to share the latter conception, which appears as a nostalgia for a traditional economy where texts mediate relationships between authors and readers. This view runs counter to evidence of the reader's power to determine a text's status. In this analysis, works by and about Breton are treated according to a model of reading as consumption. The clash between Breton's metatextual comments about his work, as in the example of Nadja, and readers' divergent interpretations illustrates the point, based tangentially on Austin, that modern readers do things with texts, thereby ultimately determining the nature of what they read. This study challenges received notions about Breton's surrealism. He may be seen in the Second manifeste du surrealisme as both exhibiting an awareness of how individuals use texts and at the same time striving to control reader response, a conflict which manifests itself as an avant-garde position in his work. However, at the end of the twenties, as Breton and Paul Eluard write L'Immaculee Conception, they apparently abandon ecriture automatique in response to their awareness of the reader's active construction of meaning in the reading transaction. Through its main conclusion, that readers consume surrealism, the dissertation suggests that this occurs in ways determined by economic culture. In the transaction between readers and surrealist text, they appear to use texts and objects in similar ways; for example, work carried out on an automatic text apparently increases its exchange-value. In the modern reading situation, the reader's consumption of the text may (re)create the text in such a way that it performs other functions than those its author may have envisioned.Ph.D.Economic theoryLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsModern literatureRomance literatureSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128984/2/9308312.pd