Modernist Poetry and the Limitations of Materialist Theory: The Importance of Constructivist Values by Charles Altieri (review)

Abstract

891 The first issue of the latter journal included a manifesto declaring that “surrealism alone has recognised the historical mission of laziness” (210–11). Chicago Surrealists produced an explosive cultural mixture, combining IWW sabotage tactics, surrealist imagination, and Herbert Marcuse’s “pleasure principle.” In the 1970s, Franklin Rosemont had an extended correspondence—some of which was published—with Marcuse, who, despite some disagreements with his young friend, believed that surrealism was an effective antidote to the “performance principle” which produced in the necessity of work. As Penelope Rosemont argues in “A Brief Rant Against Work,” a pamphlet from 2000 that invokes to Marx, Breton, and Marcuse, “without work, the capitalist juggernaut . . . would grind to a halt” (182). This last chapter of Susik’s book holds special interest because it shows that surrealism as a movement of cultural subversion was not limited to Paris and did not end with Breton’s death. Thanks to Susik, an important aspect of surrealist activity and of the surrealist “structure of feeling” has been thoroughly analyzed and discussed for the first time. Future scholarly reflections on this unique movement, founded in 1924 but still active in many places in the world, will have to take into account her narrative of surrealist sabotage.