Within a general modernist discourse of the phantasmagoria of the city, Le paysan de Paris stands out as a characteristic case of surrealist urban mythology. The book is seen as exemplary of the surrealists’ dedication to Paris, both as an urban reality and as a condition of possibility for their movement, in large part because of Walter Benjamin’s early focus on it. Benjamin’s reading of surrealism has largely oriented contemporary critical discourses, and one result of this is the invocation of an unbreakable association between surrealism and the city. However, in the middle of the ’movable feast’ that designated 1920s Paris as the Cosmopolis par excellence, it is to a ’peasant’, a non-urban figure, that Aragon gives Paris, and through whom Paris is given to us. This surrealist representation of the city breaks away from prevalent modernist accounts that pitch the ’city’ vs. ’country’ and ’urban’ vs. ’natural’. This chapter argues that the surrealist narratives which focus on the city undo prevalent tropes associated with the representation of the urban in modernity to ultimately subvert the genre of the novel as it was formed in the realist tradition.

The principle and technique of collage as the juxtaposition of disparate elements is generally considered to be the fundamental model of twentieth-century avant-garde art forms. As structure rather than representation it ranges from Picasso’s cubist works to Rauschenberg’s combines; and within Surrealism, from Joan Miro’s pasted papers to George Hugnet’s “poèmes découpés.” This chapter argues that verbal and visual collage is at the heart of Surrealism’s revolutionary project, the means of contesting the established order, by imaginatively reconfiguring signs to produce new meanings – poetic, erotic, or satirical. Various questions regarding collage are explored. What are its limits? Can the concept embrace Dalí’s assemblages, film montage, Breton’s display of objects, or examples of citation, parody, or pastiche? Can it be defined as an experimental form rather than an aesthetic object, a dynamic process rather than a finished product? If collage is considered a collective activity, can it be identified with intertextuality? Finally, the chapter examines critical interpretations of collage by the surrealists themselves and explores examples of postsurrealist collage.