Book contents
- A History of the Surrealist Novel
- A History of the Surrealist Novel
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I Marvellous Beginnings
- II Transgression and Excess
- III Science, Alchemy, Nature
- Chapter 12 Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel
- Chapter 13 Pataphysics
- Chapter 14 Alchemical Narratives
- Chapter 15 Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel
- IV Transnational Surrealism
- Index
Chapter 15 - Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel
from III - Science, Alchemy, Nature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2023
- A History of the Surrealist Novel
- A History of the Surrealist Novel
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I Marvellous Beginnings
- II Transgression and Excess
- III Science, Alchemy, Nature
- Chapter 12 Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel
- Chapter 13 Pataphysics
- Chapter 14 Alchemical Narratives
- Chapter 15 Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel
- IV Transnational Surrealism
- Index
Summary
Surrealism’s disdain for Western civilization has increasingly come to encompass its mistreatment of animals and the environment. The surrealist critique of the exploitation and domination of other species and the planet frequently recognizes the way in which these are bound up with repression along the lines of both gender and epistemology. This chapter examines how two novels by women surrealists from different generations thematize the nexus of environmental destruction, animal exploitation, and the triumphal march of scientistic rationalism. The British-born, naturalized Mexican artist and writer Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974) and the American artist and writer Rikki Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland (1995) are caustic, humorous, and wildly adventurous interrogations of ecological catastrophes and conjurations of new modes of being that may be able to counteract them. This chapter reads The Hearing Trumpet and Phosphor in Dreamland in relation to a broader surrealist critique of environmental destruction and exploitation, and as at one and the same time eulogies of extinction and tributes to the magical potential of transformation.
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- A History of the Surrealist Novel , pp. 259 - 276Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023