Surrealism and The Uncanny – Two Quotes
In a search for the title and author of a particular book I remember reading about, I ended up in my copy of Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction by Ben Highmore (Routledge, 2002), where my skimming turned to pages on Surrealism (always a favorite for me):
“Surrealism is about an effort, an energy, to find the marvellous in the everyday, to recognize the everyday as a dynamic montage of elements, to make it strange so that its strangeness can be recognized. The classic Surrealist can be seen as Sherlock Holmes-like: faced with the deadly boredom of the everyday, the Surrealist takes to the street, working to find and create the marvellousness of the everyday.” (47)
And in connection with my Killoffer review, turning to Freud’s “The Uncanny” (on a recommendation):
“…it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise be innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance’.”