The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader - Softcover

Caillois, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822330687 ISBN 13: 9780822330684

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2003

Synopsis

The Edge of Surrealism is an essential introduction to the writing of French social theorist Roger Caillois. Caillois was part of the Surrealist avant-garde and in the 1930s founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. He spent his life exploring issues raised by this famous group and by Surrealism itself. Though his subjects were diverse, Caillois focused on concerns crucial to modern intellectual life, and his essays offer a unique perspective on many of twentieth-century France’s most significant intellectual movements and figures. Including a masterful introductory essay by Claudine Frank situating his work in the context of his life and intellectual milieu, this anthology is the first comprehensive introduction to Caillois’s work to appear in any language.

These thirty-two essays with commentaries strike a balance between Caillois’s political and theoretical writings and between his better known works, such as the popular essays on the praying mantis, myth, and mimicry, and his lesser-known pieces. Presenting several new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois’s consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adventure. Perhaps most importantly, The Edge of Surrealism provides an overdue look at how Caillois’s intellectual project intersected with the work of Georges Bataille and others including Breton, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Roger Caillois has remained relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. This superb selection of his essays, expertly translated, shows the full range of his thought and should place him next to Bataille and the Surrealists as a major intellectual figure in interwar and postwar France. Claudine Frank's general introduction and detailed commentaries on individual essays provide the necessary contexts for understanding this complex, often paradoxical thinker. A first-rate work that is sure to be of interest to all students of 20th-century French thought."--Susan Rubin Suleiman, author of" Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature"

About the Author:

Roger Caillois (1913-1978) was a French social theorist and writer.

Claudine Frank is Assistant Professor of French at Barnard College.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0822330687
• ISBN 13: 9780822330684
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 440
• Editor: Frank Claudine