View a FREE sample

Section 1

• Mad Love or L'Amour fou is surrealist theorist André Breton's case study on love.

• Following on his earlier work, Nadja, that chronicled his interactions with a young woman who was eventually shown to be mentally-unbalanced, Mad Love continues Breton's exploration of madness and love, demonstrating how, for the purposes of surrealist theory and practice, the two are completely intertwined.

• Mad Love opens with Breton invoking the theater and by beginning the first section of the book this way, Breton immediately juxtaposed ideas of theater, audience, and performers.
• The first section of Mad Love invokes the works of many avant-garde artists and theorists that Breton and the surrealist movement found inspirational antecedents, including the playwright Alfred Jarry and the poets Stephen Mallarmé, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Rimbaud, and the Comte de Lautréamont.

• Breton linked the poetic convulsion, a physical and emotional juxtaposition of ideas, to beauty and...

(read more Chapter Abstracts)

This section contains 2,152 words (approx. 8 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample