A COLLAGE-COLLABORATION: ELUARD AND ERNST.
Item
-
Title
-
A COLLAGE-COLLABORATION: ELUARD AND ERNST.
-
Identifier
-
AAI8103943
-
identifier
-
8103943
-
Creator
-
LEADLEY, ALICE WELDON.
-
Contributor
-
Henri Peyre
-
Date
-
1980
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, Romance
-
Abstract
-
This study traces the development of Paul Eluard's poetry from 1913 to 1932 and marks the influences which contributed to the formal growth of his style.;Two persons exerted important and sometimes countervailing influences during this period: "Gala," Eluard's first wife, who inspired what we shall call the romantic current; and his close friend, the renowned painter, Max Ernst, the principal source of what we shall refer to as the pictorial current.;Eluard was formed in the Franco-Provencal tradition with its platonic, idealistic conception of love and its worship of la dame lointaine. He found it difficult to realize such beliefs in his actual life. Thus he was caught up in post-war movements, such as Dada, and was especially attracted to the collage work of Max Ernst. The friendship of these two men led to an unusual association, called in this work, Collage-Collaboration. This collaboration went far beyond the mere working-together because it contained an hallucinatory, irrational, Freudian element and also because it mixed the two separate genres of painting and poetry. The almost perfect example of this Collage-Collaboration was Les Malheurs des immortels, where the painter and poet together wrote the text while the painter alone furnished the collage illustrations. At this time the association was so close that the book really seems to be by one person.;While Eluard was thus pooling his poetic gifts with those of the artist he was also composing a cycle of prose poems which reveal his inner feelings at this time. We have called this group of prose poems the oneirocritical cycle, because by dream-criticism it explores the real world of his psyche. It has helped trace back the romantic current to its origin.;After exposure, first to romantic and then to pictorial influences, Eluard finally achieved a more balanced, individual, poetic style, which is best seen in L'Amour, la poesie. Here the romantic and the pictorial elements supplement one another to achieve a synthesis of the amorous sentiment and the graphic image.;The second part of this study deals with the literary devices used by Eluard to create his new poetry--the key words, the new images and the new forms--as well as with the critical apparatus which included Collage-Collaboration and Oneirocriticism.;Eluard used key words to set off new groups of images. These key words were desensitized; they did not carry their usual, lexical meaning.;The images became striking and graphic as Eluard used them to create a new kind of pictorial grammar and punctuation for his poems. This served a practical as well as a literary purpose, for, like a number of his contemporaries, he had chosen to abandon formal punctuation and the rules of snyntax.;The forms of the poems were also important. The poems made of pictorial images alone are the most innovative, if not always the most successful. But his mixture of the image and the lyric line was always effective. Nor did he lose his skill in manipulating the old-fashioned lyric line with its straight emotional presentation of subject-matter.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
French
