Revolution In the Service of the Marvelous

Surrealist Contributions to the Critique of Miserabilism

by Franklin Rosemont

Publication date: January 2003
Paperback: $14.00

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The Chicago Surrealist Group burst on the scene in 1966 and has remained one of the most active and innovative surrealist groups in the world. Well known for their impressive achievements in poetry, the arts, and direct action, the Chicago surrealists are also noted for their highly original contributions to revolutionary theory and criticism. As Ron Sakolsky points out in his anthology, Surrealist Subversions (2002), the group has attracted the sympathetic interest of writers, thinkers and creators as varied as Herbert Marcuse, Nelson Algren, Octavio Paz, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robin D. G. Kelley, Leonora Carrington, Maurice Nadeau, Luis Bunuel, Cecil Taylor, Diane di Prima, Noel Ignatiev, and George Rawick.

SURREALISM AGAINST MISERABILISM

“It is somehow comforting to see how much our lines of thought converge.”
-Herbert Marcuse, letter to Franklin Rosemont

Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous contains twenty essays by one of contemporary surrealism's major poets and theorists, Chicago Surrealist Group co-founder Franklin Rosemont. These essays focus on the ways in which surrealist perspectives have continued to evolve and expand since the movement's worldwide resurgence in the 1960s. This wide-ranging and well-illustrated collection includes prefaces to international surrealist exhibitions and texts concerning wilderness, the politics of humor, the black radical tradition, and the critique of whiteness-documenting key developments in surreal-ism's collective evolution. Other essays explore the work of individual poets, painters, musicians and dancers whose creative activity exemplifies the movement's ongoing transformative project.

Rosemont remarks in his Introduction: “As a book about surrealism, this is also inevitably a book about freedom, desire, surprise, love, play, humor, black music, painting, collage, dance, film, ecology, subversion, revolt and revolution. Above all it is concerned with the practice of poetry: poetry as audacity and insubor-dination, a source and method of knowledge, a model for a better society, an adventure and experience that makes all the difference in the world.”