Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A literary and artistic movement of the 1900s that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious and is characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter.
- noun Literature or art produced in this style.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun An artistic movement and an aesthetic philosophy that aims for the liberation of the mind by emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the subconscious.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a 20th century movement of artists and writers (developing out of dadaism) who used fantastic images and incongruous juxtapositions in order to represent unconscious thoughts and dreams
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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It's entirely possible that I'm using the term surrealism improperly.
The Episode That Broke Me and Other "Crossroads II" Thoughts Abigail Nussbaum 2007
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But literary surrealism is a little forgotten, no?
Ballardian » ‘Le passé composé de J. G. Ballard’: JGB on Empire of the Sun 2009
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Anyone with half a brain will be leaving this country really soon ... definitely before this four year tour into surrealism is over!
Secret Service acknowledges failure in state dinner snafu 2009
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This surrealism is particularly notable in Listen to Britain, a cinema-poem about the sounds of wartime London which reaches out of itself to become a stirring portrait of its people.
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Watching him watch the waitress from behind, you can't help but think of Jan Svankmajer (whose surrealism is never equaled by Drained), or of the silly strain of Czech films epitomized by I Served the King of England by Jirí Menzel, which played at Berlin this year.
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But the videos of robotic forms, Imprecise Bodies, that ooze into other forms, as if Salvador Dalí were haunting them, make an argument that there's life left in surrealism, thanks to the imagination that Netzhammer brings to it.
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Similarly, with Bishop we can see how ongoing interests shaped her work — her early interest in surrealism, or her love of ballads and blues.
Paper Trail 2006
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Similarly, with Bishop we can see how ongoing interests shaped her work — her early interest in surrealism, or her love of ballads and blues.
Paper Trail 2006
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I don't know if magical surrealism is a genre but that's what I would call Kafka on the Shore.
Reader reviews of Kafka on The Shore by Haruki Murakami. 2005
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The affinity of the new style with French surrealism is striking.
bilby commented on the word surrealism
Surrealism without purpose is like penguins with plastic buckets.
June 6, 2008