Magritte's interarts dialog with literature
The Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte (1898-1967) is well known for his thought-provoking and witty images that challenge the observer's preconditioned perceptions of reality.

Magritte and Literature examines some of the artist's major paintings whose titles were influenced by and related to works of literature. Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, Goethe's Elective Affinities, and Poe's The Domain of Arnheim are representative examples of Magritte's interarts dialog with literary figures. Despite these convergences the titles subvert the images in his paintings. It is the two images together, the image in the painting and the image in the title, that expresses the aesthetics of Surrealism -- sparked by the juxtaposition of unrelated objects. Magritte's challenge to representation compares with metafiction's challenge to classic realism, Les Chants de Maldoror for example, and the intersecting space between art and writing, sometimes referred to as the iconotext, manifests itself whenever Magritte borrows a literary title for a painting. His strategy is to paint visible thought, and this reverse ekphrasis, the opposite of a rhetorical description of a painting, undermines the written text. When he succeeds, the effect is poetry.

This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

About the Author
Ben Stoltzfus, Edward A. Dickson Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside, is an internationally recognized scholar of Chenneviere, Gide, Robbe-Grillet, Hemingway, Lacan, Magritte, and Jasper Johns.

Reviews

What a fantastic book! A real treasure--it brings to it all of the author's inimitable skill with language, poetry, and visual aesthetics [...] handsomely printed and so well illustrated - Professor MacCannell, University of California, Irvine

It is a masterpiece that not only just full justice to Magritte as a great artist but also reveals his intellectual powers. - Professor Emeritus Judd Hubert, University of California, Irvine

The relationships uncovered with Lautreamont, Jules Verne, and even Hegel and Goethe is amazing. It's a really fascinating book. - Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita from Stanford University, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Book Information
ISBN 9789058679604
Author Ben Stoltzfus
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Leuven University Press
Publisher Leuven University Press