The language of the Surrealist manifestoes: An expansion of aesthetics and stylistic expressivity

This dissertation seeks to determine if, through the results of this detailed study, the manifesto can be integrated as an important form in literary criticism and ultimately classified as a new genre. Through a detailed analysis of the stylistics of the major Surrealist manifestoes written from 1924 to 1936, I have been able to trace how each Surrealist conveyed to the reader a keen insight into the creation of what the Surrealists have come to call sur-realite. The Surrealists were obviously dissatisfied with the kind of reality that previous writers had created in their works. Common to all the Surrealists, in fact, was the conviction that philosophical, religious, and moral concepts no longer responded to their needs, and that the literary forms they had inherited from the past were too limited to give shape to their own vision of the world. Even considering the variations among these manifestoes, my study has shown that the Surrealists came to recognize that they had to look for new ways of creating innovations in their writing and that the most flexible medium to achieve their vision of the world was not in the presentation of themes and motifs but in the flexibility of language. However, one of the peculiarities of these manifestoes is that the Surrealists realized that they couldn't say what they wanted to through the means of critical, logical language alone. Thus, they turned to the highly expressive literary images and metaphors found in fiction and poetry. The emphasis of this dissertation, therefore, is on a thorough examination of the expressive language of the manifestoes and how the use of these appropriated literary forms as a source for criticism created an expansion of critical writing. The techniques derived from the art and craft of manifesto-writing opened up new avenues of approaches to interpreting and writing about literary works. If the results of my study--a study that would also have to be applied to all of the other "isms" that have produced manifestoes--are not sufficient to attribute the status of a genre to the manifesto, the techniques derived from the art and craft of manifesto-writing could nevertheless be used to indicate that Surrealism has created an environment in which critical writing goes beyond providing interpretive approaches and insights into the work and instead recreates the atmosphere of the literary work. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).