Colette Leinman
Colette Leinman, Assistant in French Department of Tel Aviv University, holds a Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University.Her publications deal with the relationship between the visual and the verbal, text and image.
As a poet she has published the collection Des comme si à croire et à rêver, L'HARMATTAN, coll. "poètes des cinq continents", Paris 2004, [As ifs to believe and to dream, L'HARMATTAN, "poets of the five continents" series, Paris 2004], and in poetry reviews. As a painter she participates in exhibitions and her works are to be found in public and private collections.
Thesis
The catalogues of surrealist exhibitions (CES), 1924-1938.
(Les catalogues d'expositions surréalistes (CES) à Paris 1924-1938)The exhibition catalogue, like the other experimental subversive surrealist practises, does not match the institutional practise of a catalogue in its traditional conception. The latter catalogue fulfils a mediatory function (describes, interprets, evaluates) for which an utterer deemed to be competent and neutral has assumed responsibility. By contrast, surrealisme insists on subjectivity for the apprehension of what is real and rejects every convention or constraint that the genres have imposed. However, the CES does not present itself solely in terms of a rift: it is also aligned with a project, that of a revolutionary movement proposing to break down the moral and esthetic order, so as to put in its place another ethics of behaviour and fresh values. Now, every ideology has the effect of rendering discourse coherent. That contradicts the spontaneous eruption of a narcissistic type of writing and an often incoherent discourse.
The surrealist exhibition catalogue offers, then, a form of tension between mental outlay and textual economy, between esthetic autonomy and ideological message. Taking as our starting point the study of a corpus difficult to apprehend, we will endeavor to bring into focus the mode of operation that characterizes discursiveness set in a social and institutional space where it is necessary to take account of avant-garde issues. We will attempt to bring into focus the protest dimension and what is specific to the nascent art criticism formulated in the various CES. We shall make use of the notions and the instruments of the modern language sciences and of argumentation in order to reveal the devices and the strategies put in place by the writer.
