AbstractsLanguage, Literature & Linguistics

From the moment that bombs began to fall from the sky on the city of London, Surrealism inflected representations of reality in a variety of media. This dissertation tells a story about the relationship between Surrealism and documentary in Britain during the Second World War. It uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine the wide-ranging effects of Surrealism on British wartime culture and society and to consider some of the ways in which documentary extended and limited the project of Surrealism. Surrealism and documentary coincided historically in Britain, yet in many respects these movements opposed one another. As fraught as their wartime convergence might have been, it fostered a rich environment for cultural production to which critics have only begun to attend. By framing visual and literary works in terms of the privileged concepts in Surrealism—Convulsive Beauty and the marvellous—the dissertation makes a critical intervention into extant conversations about the conflation between reality and representation during wartime. Chapter One examines the photography of Lee Miller, a model, fashion photographer, and war correspondent. Miller, an American who studied photography with Man Ray in Paris during the late 1920s and early 1930s, lived in London during the Blitz with her husband, Roland Penrose, a founding member of the English Surrealist Group. She took photographs of the bizarre effects of air raids on buildings and objects, and recorded the shocking aftermath of the war in France and Germany. In Chapter Two, I discuss the documentary films of Humphrey Jennings, who also co-founded the English Surrealist Group and helped to organise the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, the pivotal event for English Surrealism. The chapter speculates what relationship, if any, propaganda might have to Surrealism, a movement predicated upon unencumbered creative and political autonomy. Jennings' documentaries represent complicated examples of Surrealist cinema, in part because their primary objective was to serve the State by shoring up public morale. Chapter Three concerns the short fiction and literary non-fiction of William Sansom, a writer who starred as an actor in one of Jennings' films and volunteered as a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service. As well as being records of his life as a firefighter during the Blitz, Sansom's wartime writings document the crises of visuality and cognition that marred his effort to articulate the truth about his experiences at the epicentre of the war on the home front. In Chapter Four, I read Elizabeth Bowen's short story collection, The Demon Lover, and novel about wartime, The Heat of the Day, as records of a cultural denouement of Surrealism and documentary. Neither a Surrealist nor a documentarian, Bowen uses literary fiction to describe the psychological aftershocks of war, and to critique the rhetorical conventions and clichés of the eye-witness genre. Her passing familiarity with, and scepticism about, Surrealism and documentary make her an…