Surrealism

Surrealism, movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism’s emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. 

According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

Characteristics
In the poetry of Breton, Paul Éluard, Pierre Reverdy, and others, Surrealism manifested itself in a juxtaposition of words that was startling because it was determined not by logical but by psychological—that is, unconscious—thought processes. Surrealism’s major achievements, however, were in the field of painting. Surrealist painting was influenced not only by Dadaism but also by the fantastic and grotesque images of such earlier painters as Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya and of closer contemporaries such as Odilon Redon, Giorgio de Chirico, and Marc Chagall. 

The practice of Surrealist art strongly emphasized methodological research and experimentation, stressing the work of art as a means for prompting personal psychic investigation and revelation. Breton, however, demanded firm doctrinal allegiance. Thus, although the Surrealists held a group show in Paris in 1925, the history of the movement is full of expulsions, defections, and personal attacks.

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What Does RAIN Symbolize?

The Symbolism of Rain – 7 Examples in Movies & Books
By Chris Drew, PhD

The symbolism of rain varies across different types of literature and movies.

It has been used as a symbol for many thousands of years, perhaps most notably in the floods in the bible.

Rain can symbolize many things. It can represent unhappiness, rebirth, foreboding, determination, the breaking of a drought, and a pause for introspection.

Here are some examples of how rain is employed as a literary device.
1. Unhappiness and Melancholy
2. Ominous Foreboding
3. Rebirth and Renewal
4. Romance
5. Determination
6. A Pause for Introspection
7. Cleansing

1. Unhappiness and Melancholy
Rain often washes over a scene when the protagonist in a film, TV show or literature is ‘awash’ with sadness.

This may be because rain is oppressive. The clouds that it comes with lock out light and the warmth of the sun. It prevents us from going outdoors to enjoy nature. It literally makes our days grayer and darker.

When a character is sad or moody, rainy weather is often employed as a way of showing how the world is empathizing with the character.

An example is in the book Great Expectations. Pip narrates:

…stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud, mud, mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. … gloomy accounts had come in from the coast, of shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the worst of all.

Here, Pip is outlining how the weather is mirroring his gloomy feeling as he spends his days depressed in London.

2. Ominous Foreboding
Rain may also symbolize foreboding. In fact, this symbolism often parallels the use of rain as a sign of melancholy – because the rain is indicating that there are no good prospects to come. There are “dark clouds on the horizon”. Indeed, it can often take place in the final scene of a move that we know will not end well.  READ MORE