Reinventions of the literary avant -garde in interwar France: Documents between surrealism and ethnography

Published between 1930 and 1931, the art journal Documents brought together former surrealists and representatives of the nascent discipline of ethnography under the direction of Georges Bataille. This dissertation examines Documents as a case study in the reinvention of avant-garde practice in interwar France.;Chapters One and Two examine how contemporary criticism has constructed an image of interwar avant-garde groups such as the College of Sociology and Documents. I argue that these constructions are largely grounded in the emergence of poststructuralist thought in France and its later adoption in the United States in the form of postmodernism in literary theory and anthropology. I contend that proper understanding of the issues at stake in the reinvention of avant-garde practice requires a literary-historical contextualization of these groups.;Chapters Three and Four examine the surrealist movement in relation to interwar primitivism and the development of a surrealist epistemology of the Other. The turn to the Other and to questions of knowledge, I argue, was inscribed in the crisis that marked surrealism's emergence in the avant-garde literary field. Surrealism's success in imposing a new "epistemological" definition of avant-garde practice opened the way for other groups to radicalize surrealist practice by adopting the discourses of ethnography and sociology.;Chapter Four examines the situation of ethnography in interwar France. I argue that the discipline's institutional and intellectual marginality was a precondition for its adoption as a reference by a fraction of the avant-garde. At the same time, I contend that the avant-garde's metonymical representation of the Other distinguished it from the metaphorical discourse of the ethnographic museum.;Chapter Five examines Documents as a historical artifact in opposition to current theoretical construction of the journal. Documents is the site of multiple and overlapping discourses on ethnography that defy easy categorization. I study the esoteric and hermetic as an intermediate space between surrealism and ethnography in Michel Leiris's contributions. I argue that Michel Leiris's itinerary condenses the issues at stake in the reinvention of avant-garde practice in interwar France.