| Abstract
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In 1929, the father of surrealism André Breton and his friends published a “world map in the time of the surrealists,” which placed the Pacific in the center with a disappearing Europe and a nonexistent USA, and showing oversized islands from New Guinea to Ireland. During the 1930s, surrealist ideas and practices were creatively transformed beyond recognition by marginal writers who had emigrated to and/or excommunicated surrealists living in Paris. Looking beyond Casanova’s and Moretti’s centers and (semi)peripheries that organize the world system, I argue that by thinking instead of cultural centers like Paris as inhabited simultaneously both by central but also by (semi)peripheral writers we may get new and more nuanced insights into the circulation and transformation of ideas beyond the traditional story of surrealism told by literary histories. Using the example of the French translation of Joyce’s “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” I uncover the hidden story of the transformation of Joyce’s text into a surrealist cognate from the peripheries of surrealism itself. In 1929, the father of surrealism André Breton and his friends published a “world map in the time of the surrealists,” which placed the Pacific in the center with a disappearing Europe and a nonexistent USA, and showing oversized islands from New Guinea to Ireland. During the 1930s, surrealist ideas and practices were creatively transformed beyond recognition by marginal writers who had emigrated to and/or excommunicated surrealists living in Paris. Looking beyond Casanova’s and Moretti’s centers and (semi)peripheries that organize the world system, I argue that by thinking instead of cultural centers like Paris as inhabited simultaneously both by central but also by (semi)peripheral writers we may get new and more nuanced insights into the circulation and transformation of ideas beyond the traditional story of surrealism told by literary histories. Using the example of the French translation of Joyce’s “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” I uncover the hidden story of the transformation of Joyce’s text into a surrealist cognate from the peripheries of surrealism itself.
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