RSSCEERES and Slavic Colloquium invite you to hear Malynne Sternstein (University of Chicago) present “Toyen’s Realism.”
From Prof. Sternstein’s abstract:
The talk will explore Toyen’s anti-war work and make a claim for a full civic engagement in Czech surrealism that was absent in the French version. The claim involves a new articulation of what “realism” might be in “surrealism”, the “realismus” in Czech “nadrealismus” and jump off the point of the prefix “nad” as opposed to “sur” in the French. I would also look closely at Toyen’s narrative silence as a bid for plastic vociferation, a clamor beyond the (closed) dialectic that so many advocates—and critics—of surrealism have seen regnant. This beyond to the surrealist dialectic I see at work in Toyen’s wartime art is for me recognizable as a return of the repressed of realism or, pace Debord, a “détournement” of surrealism in realism.
Time: 4:30pm, April 5.
Location: Foster 106 (1130 E. 59th Street)