Nadja
by Andre Breton
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Description
To celebrate the centennial of surrealism we will explore this transformative movement through two notable surrealist novels: The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington and Nadja by André Breton. By reading one after the other, we can compare Breton’s foundational voice with Carrington’s uniquely imaginative, feminist perspective, gaining a richer understanding of surrealism’s scope and diversity of voices.
We will start with Nadja by André Breton as it makes sense chronologically and contextually.
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Nadja was originally published in France in 1928 and is considered a book which defined the surrealist movement's attitude toward everyday life.
The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in the city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in Nadja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. "The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen, " Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.
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Zoom meeting date
3rd January 2025
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