SOURCE: Strauss, Jonathan. “Paul Eluard and the Origins of Visual Subjectivity.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 33, no. 2 (June, 2000): 25-46.

In the following essay, Strauss discusses modern theories of subjectivity and vision in terms of the early surrealist poetry of Eluard and André Breton.

In 1975, clinical psychologists Michael Argyle and Mark Cook assessed the astounding progress recently made in gaze theory and noted admiringly that the field as a whole had existed for little over ten years. Since then, the gaze has become one of the defining intellectual issues of the late 20th-century, leading to significant innovations within some of the most active disciplines in the humanities. An archeology of this concern with vision and the visual would necessarily entail a return to its French origins, moving through Lacan and the Situationists to the unsteady ferment of intellectual currents that inspired and helped to shape...