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Books Like Manifeste du surréalisme by André Breton
The founding text of Surrealism — 'pure psychic automatism' and the unconscious
The 1924 manifesto that defined Surrealism as 'pure psychic automatism' and established the movement's precursors, methods, and aesthetic program — the most influential French aesthetic manifesto since Hugo's preface to Cromwell. If this radical theory of the unconscious in art draws you, these works share its liberatory ambition.
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Nadja
by André Breton
The creative realization of the Manifesto's program — where the Manifesto is theory, Nadja is practice; the ten-day encounter with a mysterious woman in Paris showing what it actually feels like to live the Surrealist ideal.
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Buy on AmazonL'Amour fou
by André Breton
The fullest development of the Manifesto's key concepts — objective chance, convulsive beauty, the dissolution of the boundary between inner and outer — developed through the account of a love affair and a flea market visit.
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Buy on AmazonLes Chants de Maldoror
by Comte de Lautréamont
One of the Manifesto's most important precursors — Breton explicitly names Lautréamont as a Surrealist before Surrealism; the violent, hallucinatory prose epic is the direct ancestor of the automatic writing ideal.
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Buy on AmazonIlluminations
by Arthur Rimbaud
Rimbaud is the most important of the Surrealist precursors — the voyant theory, the systematic derangement of the senses, the visual intensity of the prose poems are all direct ancestors of what the Manifesto calls for.
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Buy on AmazonLe Paysan de Paris
by Louis Aragon
Aragon's 1926 Surrealist urban prose poem is the most immediate parallel realization of the Manifesto's program — published two years after it, representing how the Surrealist method of irrational attentiveness applies to the Paris streetscape.
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Les Champs magnétiques
by André Breton and Philippe Soupault
The first automatic writing experiment (1920) cited in the Manifesto — reading the raw product of automatic writing gives the most direct sense of what the Manifesto is theorizing and how it actually looks on the page.
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Buy on AmazonUne saison en enfer
by Arthur Rimbaud
Rimbaud's farewell to the visionary program that the Manifesto claims as its ancestor — reading the Season in Hell alongside the Manifesto shows the tradition that Breton is inheriting and the failure that Rimbaud declared; the comparison is essential.
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Buy on AmazonThe Interpretation of Dreams
by Sigmund Freud
The theoretical source that the Manifesto draws on for its concept of the unconscious — reading the relevant sections of Freud gives the context for understanding what Breton means by 'automatism' and 'unconscious,' and what he departs from in Freud's account.
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