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Front row: Murphy Protzman '13, Louisa Meyer '12, Vanessa Amato '12, Aliya Headley '12. Back row: Professor Amy deGraff, Charlotte Cathey '12 |
1/26/12
Randolph-Macon College Professor Amy deGraff’s
French Literature of the First Half of the 20th Century students may well describe her class as surreal. That’s because, during
January Term, they studied the works of Magritte, Man Ray, Dali and other artists famous for their contributions to surrealism.
The Surrealist movement held that modern man’s perception of the world is limited by his conscious mind, especially by the roles of reason and logic, which organize and categorize the way we see and experience time, space and matter. Other “villains” who steal from us the ability to see a more poetic and mysterious reality are the conventions of habit and the norms of culture and society. Through their writing and their art, the Surrealists sought to shock the viewer/reader from his conventional way of seeing.
“Talking about surrealism and looking at surrealist art was the first step,” explains deGraff. “Having students create their own surrealist objects was the second. Engaging in this way was an exercise in creativity, which forced the students to make unusual and poetic associations. One student saw that a banana with its peels spread on a plate could look much like an octopus. She entitled the work ‘Fruits de mer’ (‘fruits of the sea,’ which in French means ‘seafood’).”
In a further surrealist experience, each day the banana sat, its peels grew blacker and harder, practically transforming themselves into tentacles. “The Surrealists took great pleasure in the role of the unexpected and this serendipitous happening would have certainly delighted them,” says deGraff. “The play of the imagination freed from logic, the possibility for new associations, and paradoxes resolving into new synthesis all gave students an experience with the poetic. The objects have continued to sit on a table in our classroom. They don’t seem to want to go home.”
In addition to studying Surrealism in both
art and literature, students read André Gide’s
l’ Immoraliste (“The Immoralist”) and later the works of French philosopher-writers Camus and Sartre. The class is ending with a study of the Theater of the Absurd, and in particular with Beckett’s very famous play,
En Attendant Godot ("Waiting for Godot").
January Term is a four-week session between the fall and spring semesters that provides students with an opportunity to immerse themselves in another culture, gain real-life experience through an internship or explore other areas of study.