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L'Esprit Créateur The Classical Model is an elegant piece of criticism. Carefully formulated and tightly written , it argues convincingly that literature clarifies science by showing how any organization of knowledge is also an ideologically marked act of representation. Classical literature dramatizes tensions between the proposed unity of textual models and the world's fragmentation, showing how meanings that are apparently exiled through efforts to control perceptions of the real come to signify from outside the frame of representation. Such, Stone argues ultimately, is the secret logic of absolutism. Embracing all, as Montaigne anticipated, it speaks of absence and gives voice to its alienated Others. Jeffrey N. Peters University of Kentucky Mary Ann Caws. The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Pp. xxii + 344. $37.50. In The Surrealist Look Mary Ann Caws reflects upon the ways surrealist art looks at its objects, how it conditions the beholder's gaze, and how we regard surrealism today. She describes that look as incessantly reciprocal in character, always cutting at least two ways, a pointing—and pointed—gaze that elaborates broad, specular relations between the artist, the artifact, and the beholder in an encounter that is as much about the self as the other: "To think surrealism is to rethink the self (21). Locating the surrealist enterprise firmly and convincingly in the baroque tradition, she argues that the new ways of looking that surrealism inaugurates are erotically charged, both in the production of surrealist art and in its reception. The readings here are rich and diverse. Caws considers the way male surrealists construct "the feminine" in starkly ablative form, and she looks through Breton's postulation of Melusine as the surrealist heroine of the changing self, before turning to issues of female self-construction in the work of Dorothea Tanning and Claude Cahun. She offers a compelling reading of Robert Desnos's Deuil pour Deuil, staging him as "the great baroque modern poet" (167). She discusses Man Ray's play upon the tensions prevailing between the artificial and the natural; Antonin Artaud's search for "a new idea of man" in Mexican Indian culture; René Char's writings on surrealist art; and the delicately framed economies of Joseph Cornell's magic boxes. Taking the cadavre exquis as a privileged example of surrealist practice, she meditates upon how the aleatory inflects upon—and indeed enables—the motivated. The cadavre exquis disorients normative relations in a radical manner; yet nonetheless, "it is about relations: about the one between the mind and its objects, the mind and chance" (235). Finally, Caws considers Ludwig Wittgenstein as a "philosopher of gesture" (261) and adduces certain pungent gestures in Marcel Duchamp's art as she analyzes the implicative dimension of surrealism, the way in which the surrealist work points "in," just as it points "out." Each of these readings remains close to the objects under consideration, and the volume is judiciously illustrated with reproductions of surrealist art. The analyses in The Surrealist Look are original, powerful, and resourceful. The gaze that Mary Ann Caws casts on surrealist art in this book is both scholarly and deeply personal; she admits that it is animated in the first instance by a vertiginous leap of faith: "You have to believe it to see it. I believe it" (22). What results from that fundamental stance is a style of writing that is both engaging and engaged, characterized by an intellectual exuberance very much like that of surrealism itself, and which suggests, through the force of vital example, why surrealism continues to intrigue us. Warren Motte University of Colorado 120 Summer 1998 ...

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