Convulsive Beauty: hysteria and the Surrealist movement
André Breton, the founder of the surrealist movement, declared ‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or it will not be at all.’
This talk explores the history behind Breton’s ‘convulsive’ beauty and how it can help us understand Surrealism. We’ll see how the context war and hysteria studies inspired Surrealists to challenge conceptions of ‘normalcy’ and how they helped shape the possibilities of a new world.
Image credit: Paul Richer, from Études cliniques sur l’hystéro-épilepsie ou grande hystérie, 1881 (via Wellcome Collection)
Speaker Bio:
Sarah Jaffray
Curated & Hosted by:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
