The following is an annotated bibliography, part one of many. Please see the previous post, “bibliography part one,” for this list sans my research notes.
Reference Type: Book
Author: Belton, Robert James
Year: 1995
Title: The Beribboned Bomb: The image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art
City: Calgary
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
ISBN: 1-895176-54-9
Brilliantly organized table of contents–My favorite.
Intro: The surrealist woman “remains the creation of a patriarchal order whose contemporary reception ensured that she would be seen in an anti-feminist light.”
Chapter 1, A Synoptic History of Surrealism: A quick overview of surrealism: the (male?) surrealists gave expressions to the human aspirations that were determined by their time, a time which they were trying to escape. The (male) surrealists “resisted the constructs of masculinity by harbouring themselves within the imaginary, but their defiance affirmed its existence… and women were caught in the undertow.”
Chapter 6.2, Men’s Woman, Women’s Woman; An Hysterical Interlude: I want to read this chapter right now, [f annotated bibs]
6.3; “A Ribbon Around a Bomb”: “the place of woman among the Surrealists was not different from the one she occupies among the population in general”~Tanning. So why did women participate? Benton offers evidence for their attachments to men, attractions to a new cultural fashion, and desire to burlesque men. Distinguishes Carrington as a “post-Surrealist.” Explains Tanning’s lemur, compares Gala Dalí and Sage’s posteriors.
Reference Type: Book
Author: Chadwick, Whitney
Year: 1985
Title: Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement
City: Boston
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
ISBN: 0-8212-1599-X
This book deserves much more of my attention. I have been ignoring it because it is older than I am, and it carries the funk of fifteen years unearthed. Still, Chadwick produced a thorough examination, complete with fantastic reproductions of surrealist work by women. A complete survey text–painfully long chapters without clear divisions.
Reference Type: Edited Book
Editor: Chadwick, Whitney
Year: 1998
Title: Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-representation
City: Cambridge
Publisher: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ISBN: 0-262-53157-7
With clearer organization than the previous book and updated information, this book is a good overview of women in surrealism up to 1998. The formatting of the book is slightly obnoxious, the column style creates a lot wasted of space. The plates are crisp and tidy. Chapters 3-6 deserve a good once over
Reference Type: Book
Author: Conley, Katharine
Year: 1996
Title: Automatic woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism
City: Lincoln
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0-8032-1474-X
Chapter 2, Beyond the Border: Lenora Carrington’s Terrible Journey: This chapter is still on my reading list, which makes me feel inadequate because it seems so useful.
Reference Type: Edited Book
Editor: Reynolds, Penny Florence and Dee
Year: 1995
Title: Feminist Subjects, Multi-Media; Cultural Methodologies
City: Manchester and New York
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 0-7190-4179-1
Section 1, Chapter 1, The Politics of Spectatorship; The ‘View from Elsewhere’; Extracts from a semi-public correspondence about the politics of feminist spectatorship: A readable and informative, although slightly disorienting series of letters addressing the gaze in A Bar at the Folies Bergere. Cheers to Pollock for actively engaging the reader.
Chapter 2, Frida Kahlo’s ‘grotesque’ bodies: A brilliant essay encapsulating the relationship between Kahlo’s physical body and painted bodies… I balk at some of Chedgzoy’s assertions (what she considers the most powerful and haunting elements of Kahlo’s work involves the mother, while I am most haunted by the elements that involve romantic passions.–Mother as other vs Diego as other.) However, I appreciate such salient commentary as the following: Kahlo’s paintings of birth, miscarriage, and the grotesque and suffering body, actually represent the process by which the female body is socialised, rendered abject by the technological gaze of patriarchal culture.
Chapter 3, Women and Surrealism: A chapter of poems about women’s art. On a hot day of research I wish for more cool poetry–why can’t more academics be as filtered as Presley?
Chapter 4, A credit to her mother: Bored to tears and didn’t finish the essay. Let me know if you made it through and valued the experience.
Section 3, Chapter 10, Repositioning feminist subjects;’I’ the reader: Text, context and the balance of power: An autobiographical account of Pearce’s changing positions as a gendered reader. The essay is as tricky as the topic–but Pearce sorts out the ways that a text positions a reader sexually and politically. It is a good read for self study and considerations of the forces at work within the reader herself.
Chapter 12: Psychoanalysis and the imaginary body: Posits that the body is not sexed, but rather written on at the anatomical, physiological and neurological levels. After the first two paragraphs I wanted to give up on this one–”This chapter is an attempt to think subjectivity and especially the differences between the sexes, not in terms of the domination of the matters of mind, the mental sphere or the psyche, but in terms of bodies.” (I’m pretty sure that barely makes sense.)
Reference Type: Book
Author: Jamison, Kay Redfield
Year: 1993
Title: Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament
City: New York
Publisher: The Free Press
ISBN: 0-01-916030-8
Appendix B: Writers, artists, and composers with probable cyclotymia, major depression or manic-depressive illness. A gripping and tragic list to consider (hospitalizations, suicide attempts and suicides are listed with each name). While perhaps tangentially useful to my study, I picked up this book per the recommendation of a friend.
Wow, that was a mouthful.
