SOURCE: Erickson, John D. “Surrealist Black Humor as Oppositional Discourse.” Symposium 42, no. 3 (fall 1988): 198-215.

In the following essay, Erickson analyzes black humor in the context of André Breton's model of a new literary discourse, as it was outlined in his Anthologie de l'humour noir, focusing on the circumstances that lead to the creation of black humor.

Le problème de l'action sociale n'est … qu'une des formes d'un problème plus général que le surréalisme s'est mis en devoir de soulever et qui est celui de l'expression humaine sous toutes ses formes. Qui dit expression dit, pour commencer, langage,” wrote André Breton in his Second manifeste du surréalisme (1930).¹ One of those forms of “expression humaine,” the humoristic discourse of surrealism, exemplified by André Breton in his Anthologie de l'humour noir,² promises to yield further to our understanding if we reread it through the filter, first...