I am in the process of reading Ferdinand Alquié’s The Philosophy of Surrealism (an important book I hope to return to in the near future) and came across the striking passage below from André Breton’s Soluble Fish (1924). Alquié includes this brief excerpt while discussing water imagery in the section titled “Derealization” of Chapter 2, […]
The Romanian writer Panaït Istrati (1884-1935) seems to be virtually unknown in the U.S., although the recent republication of his first novel, Kyra Kyralina by Talisman House may serve to remedy this situation somewhat. Biographical information about him is not in abundance in English and, sadly, I have had to rely on the Wikipedia entry […]
Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings From Africa and the Diaspora Edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley University of Texas Press. 2009. 395 pages. A title in the Surrealist Revolution series. ••• African-American historian Robin Kelley and Surrealist Franklin Rosemont (who passed away in 2009) have produced a provocative compilation of Surrealist texts […]
I just had the opportunity to read André Breton: Magus of Surrealism by Anna Balakian, the first American scholar to seriously investigate Surrealism. Balakian, who passed away in 1997 (see obituary in The New York Times, August 15, 1997), published Literary Origins of Surrealism in 1947, after having interviewed Breton when he lived in New […]
The list of contemporary academics producing scholarship on Marx worth reading is, sadly, a short one. Paresh Chattopadhyay, however, has a secure place on it. Chattopadhyay, a faculty member of the Department of Sociology of the University of Montreal, has made an interesting intellectual journey from close association with the thought of Charles Bettelheim, a […]
Capitalist rule is caught in its own trap, and cannot ban the spirit that it has invoked. —Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet (1915) *** I don’t often express enthusiasm about the appearance of new left groups, but I have come across a case in which I’m at least willing to withhold judgment. The International Luxemburgist […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has just made available a 1953 text by Raya Dunayevskaya, “Malenkov Pledges H-Bomb and Caviar.” This document appeared in Correspondence, the newspaper of the group that had been known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency until 1951, when its members openly broke with Trotskyism and left the Socialist Workers Party to embark upon […]
Martinique: Snake Charmer by André Breton, with text and illustrations by André Masson University of Texas Press, 2008. 117 pages. One of Franklin Rosemont’s final contributions before his death in 2009 was seeing this book—part of the University of Texas Press Surrealist Revolution series, which he edited—through to print. As Rosemont says in his valuable […]
I recently came cross this notice in the “Lost and Found” section of the March 19, 1942 New York Times. The mind reels at the questions raised by this notice. Was this Breton’s own copy of the book? He and his family were living as political refugees in New York at the time. Did anyone […]
To mark May Day 2010, which in the U.S. will be a day of mass demonstrations against the ongoing anti-immigrant political offensive, I am providing link to the Hathi Trust scan of The Working-Class Movement in America by Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx (Karl Marx’s youngest daughter). This fascinating account of their 1886 speaking tour […]
Criticism &c. 