Why does Surrealism continue to fascinate us a century after André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism was first published? How do we encounter Surrealism today? On Thursday, January 16, at 6pm join Mary Ann Caws and Mark Polizzotti as they tackle these questions among others, over the course of a conversation based on their latest books: Why Surrealism Matters (Yale University Press) and Symbolism, Dada, Surrealisms: Selected Writing of Mary Ann Caws (The University of Chicago Press).

Caws and Polizzotti will reframe the Surrealist movement in contemporary terms and offers insight into why it continues to inspire. Our guests speakers will also explore how the Surrealists grappled with ideas that mirror current concerns, including racial and economic injustice, sexual politics, issues of identity, labor unrest, and political activism.

In English. Free with RSVP. Click here for tickets.

MARK POLIZZOTTI is the author of Lautréamont Nomad (1994), Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (FSG, 1995), Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (British Film Institute, 2006), and Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (Continuum, 2006). His articles and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, ARTnews, The Nation, Parnassus, Partisan Review, and elsewhere. The translator of over thirty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, Raymond Roussel, André Breton, and Jean Echenoz, he has been an editor at Random House, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, David R. Godine, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He currently directs the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

MARY ANN CAWS is an expert on Surrealism and the author of biographies of Proust, Woolf and James, she is renowned as a lively and insightful writer on art and literature. Her many areas of interest in twentieth-century avant-garde literature and art include poets René Char and André Breton, and the Bloomsbury group, and artists Robert Motherwell, Joseph Cornell, and Pablo Picasso. Conceptually, one of her primary themes has been the relationship between image and text.
She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Recently, she published Symbolism, Dada, Surrealisms, Selected Writing of Mary Ann Caws (The University of Chicago Press), and edited the anthology of essential surrealist writings The Milk Bowl of Feathers(New Directions). Mary Ann Caws is also the author of The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism (Princeton, 1970); Surrealist Painters and Poets (MIT, 2001); Surrealist Love Poems (Tate, 2001); The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (MIT, 1997); Surrealism, with Jonathan Eburne (Phaidon, 2004); Surrealism and Women (with Kuenzli and Raaberg) MIT, 1991; Staging Surrealism (with Donna De Salvo) 1998; Translation of André Breton’s L’amour fou (Mad Love) (Univ of Nebraska) and André Breton (Twayne, 1996).