TITLE : Paris-Prague : converging surrealist views. Poetical birth of town AUTHOR : Sophie Ireland DEPARTMENT : Literature,languages, theatre - Romance literature SUPERVISORS : Prof. Myriam Boucharenc - Doc. PhDr. Aleš Pohorský, Csc ABSTRACT : This work aims to study the intersection of urban poetry produced by trips to Paris and Prague of artists who have contributed to the foundation of surrealism and by publication of their works in both cities. The travels of artists from Paris and Prague in each city allow encounters revealing artistic affinities. They promote aesthetic links and poetic exchanges between the founding artists of surrealism in Paris and Prague. The treatment of each capital through poetic transcriptions of stays in a foreign city and through works that reveals the possibilities of adventure in a familiar ciy leads to a comparaison of realities from Paris and Prague. The study of works makes possible to distinguish subjects circulating from a text to another and to put in light a common semiotic through witch appear features of surrealist city. The revival desire of avant-garde artists underlies that exploration of the city and contributes to the development of a subversive image of the city. Poetry creates a disruption of representations and is an opposition to ordinaries...

Ce travail se propose d’étudier le croisement des poétiques urbaines produit par les voyagesà Paris et à Prague d’artistes ayant contribué à la fondation du surréalisme et par les publications deleurs oeuvres dans chacune des deux villes.Les déplacements des Pragois et des Parisiens dans l’une et l’autre ville sont l’occasion derencontres révélatrices d’affinités artistiques. Ils favorisent les rapprochements esthétiques et leséchanges poétiques entre des artistes fondateurs du surréalisme à Paris et à Prague.Le traitement de chacune des deux capitales dans les transcriptions poétiques de séjours dansune ville étrangère et dans les oeuvres qui dévoilent les possibilités d’aventure au sein d’une villefamilière aux auteurs concourt à une mise en regard des réalités parisiennes et pragoises. L’étudedes oeuvres permet de distinguer la circulation des motifs d’un texte à l’autre et de mettre au jourune sémiotique commune à travers laquelle se dessinent les caractéristiques de la ville surréaliste.Le désir de renouveau des artistes d’avant-garde sous-tend l’exploration de la ville etcontribue à l’élaboration d’une image subversive de la ville. La poésie opère ainsi unbouleversement des représentations et s’inscrit à l’encontre des représentations ordinaires.Simultanément, elle est un révélateur de la richesse du réel. La poésie surréaliste qui dévoile ainsi le réel, tout en proposant une image renouvelée de la ville, rencontre les motifs d’une représentation archétypale de la ville. Aussi interrogeons-nous les procédés littéraires de la fondation de la ville surréaliste qui se constitue à la croisée de Paris et de Prague. / This work aims to study the intersection of urban poetry produced by trips to Paris andPrague of artists who have contributed to the foundation of surrealism and by publication of their works in both cities. The travels of artists from Paris and Prague in each city allow encounters revealing artistic affinities. They promote aesthetic links and poetic exchanges between thefounding artists of surrealism in Paris and Prague. The treatment of each capital through poetic transcriptions of stays in a foreign city and through works that reveals the possibilities of adventure in a familiar ciy leads to a comparaison of realities from Paris and Prague. The study of works makes possible to distinguish subjects from a text to another and to put in light a common semiotic through witch appear features of surrealist city.The revival desire of avant-garde artists underlies that exploration of the city and contributes to the development of a subversive image of the city. Poetry creates a disruption of representations and is an opposition to ordinaries representations. At the same time it reveals the intensity of the real. Surrealist poetry, that uncovers the real while offering a renewed image of city, meets the theme of archetypal representation of the town. So, we question the literary process of the founding of surrealist city that is at the crossroad of Prague and Paris.

Throughout the Spanish poetic production of the 20th century, cities have developed a relevant role as a recurring space at the same time as society urbanized and an exodus took place from agricultural areas to the work centers offered by the cities. Since the second half of the 19th century the city has been the meeting place for people from different backgrounds where the poet found, from his exclusive point of view, a new universe to develop in his work. However, the evolution of capitalist society sponsored the poet's transition from an artist to a worker in the service sector, now able to describe the everyday life through that "other voice" that Octavio Paz so well exhibited in his work (Paz 1990). This way, I argue that with the passage of time and the disappearance of the romanticized figure of the poet, writers who describe the daily commute of the inhabitants of the cities emerged among the working classes through a simple style that has come to be related with other transcultural artistic movements such as Minimalism or Dirty Realism. My dissertation studies the representation of the urban working class in three contemporary Spanish poets: Karmelo C. Iribarren, Itziar Mínguez Arnáiz, and Fernando del Val. I analyze their shared poetics of the city with a focus on the omnipresent common objects that seem to represent the urban everyday life. In Chapter One, I develop a conceptual “trialectic” lens through which to approach all three poets based on the convergence of urban studies, the analysis of poetic form in relation to the artistic current of Minimalism, and the imprint that U.S. author Raymond Carver-as both literary persona and style-left on Spain since his publication in translation in the late 1980s. In Chapter Two, I analyze how the processes of gentrification and privatization of public spaces reflect an experience of suffering by the working class in Iribarren's poetry. In Chapter Three, I study gender-space relations as I analyze what it means for working class women to walk the city and occupy public spaces traditionally reserved for men in Mínguez Arnáiz’ poetry. In Chapter Four, I follow Spanish expatriates across the Atlantic Ocean in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to explore resistance movements against spatial exploitation that force working classes into geographical oblivion in Del Val's “New York trilogy.” To carry out this project, I propose to analyze the works of these three authors emphasizing not only the common characteristics that each one of them presents but also those that make them unique. With this, I intend to find out the paths Spanish poetry is taking and how this realist-style poetry differs from the realistic trends of "the poetry of experience" and the "dirty realism" so popular in the 80s and 90s. I argue that with the entry of the new millennium and especially with the extensive implementation of neoliberal policies that led to the economic crisis of 2008, there is a boom in the poetry of resistance that seeks to prove that an egalitarian right to the city is more urgent than ever.

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