Surreality: Breton's Manifesto and the Literature of the Unconscious

A journalist describes a chaotic summit as having "a surreality to it." A film critic calls a scene "steeped in surreality." The word gets reached for constantly, almost always to mean something loosely like "dreamlike and a bit unsettling," and almost never with any real reference to where that meaning actually came from. Surreality is not simply a vague synonym for strangeness. It is the noun form of surreal, which is itself the adjective built directly from Surrealism, a specific, deliberately theorized literary and artistic movement founded in Paris in the 1920s with its own manifesto, its own techniques, and its own quite serious argument about where art's real material comes from. Recovering that history changes what the word is actually capable of describing. Table of Contents What Surreality Actually Means Surreality is the quality or state of being surreal, meaning marked by the intense, illogical, dreamlike incongruity associated with Surrealis…