Talk

BFA Visual & Critical Studies and the SVA Honors Program present a talk with cultural theorist, University of Chicago professor, and Honors parent Malynne Sternstein. Sternstein will reconsider the place Surrealism as a movement had in the aesthetic and anti-fascist writing of German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist Walter Benjamin.

Sternstein will focus on trying to explain the apparently sudden change in Benjamin vis-a-vis Surrealism: first against Surrealism in “Dream Kitsch” (1925/27); then seeming to approve of most of their work as having political potential (e.g. in the 1929 essay “Surrealism. Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia”); to finally the enduring spell that Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant) had over Benjamin in his uncompleted masterpiece The Arcades Project. Along the way, she’ll examine Eugène Atget’s photographs of the decaying body of Paris and other images of Paris’ residual alleyways, along with other Surrealist or Dada collage and photomontage.

Sternstein will be arguing, among other things, that Surrealism as a movement disappointed Benjamin in its potential to turn into kitsch and thus serve fascism—as Benjamin referred to it, “the aestheticization of politics”—but that it also understood the power of what he called the dialectical image and so might prove key to overcoming fascist thinking in all its forms.

In tracing these disappointments, hopes, fears, she wants to give a broad contour of the urgent connection between politics and art required to confront the contemporary rise of nationalism, xenophobia, and neo-fascism.

Malynne Sternstein is Professor in Slavic languages and literatures and the chair of the Fundamentals: Issues and Texts program at the University of Chicago. Her interests include Czech, Russian and Central European studies; the European avant-garde; semiotic theory; performance theory; gender and sexuality; aesthetic theory (kitsch); and narratology. She is the author of Against Arbitrariness: The Czech Avant-garde and the Subversion of the Symbolic Sign and Toyen: Gender, Obscurity and the Fires of Surrealism. She has been nominated for awards for excellence in both undergraduate and graduate teaching.