The Feminization of Surrealism: The Road to Surreal Silence in Selected Works of Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras’s writing is analogous to the surrealist endeavor, though her work is rarely compared to surrealist principles. This study proposes a detailed analysis of Duras’s relationship to the male-dominated literary domain of Surrealism, founded in France in 1924 by André Breton. Such an approach allows a greater understanding of her work and broadens the realm of surrealist aesthetics to include the female experience. With Duras’s final text C’est tout in mind, this book suggests a reevaluation of the Durassian corpus based on a comparison of the ultimate silence of her texts to the surrealist ideal of the marvelous. This study shows how Duras’s work encourages a reexamination of the surrealist movement to encompass the feminine unconscious, which finds its place in the realm of silence.