Description
Book SynopsisThe legendary poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, a fleeting figure on the periphery of early twentieth-century European avant-gardism, is frequently invoked as proto-Dada and Surrealist exemplar. Yet he remains an insubstantial phenomenon, not seen since 1918, lost through historical interstices, clouded in drifting untruths. This study processes philosophical positions into a practical recovery – from nineteenth-century Nietzsche to twentieth-century Deleuze – with thoughts on subjectivity, metaphor, representation and multiplicity. From fresh readings and new approaches – of Cravan’s first published work as a manifesto of simulation; of contributors to his Paris review
Maintenant as impostures for the Delaunays; and of the conjuring of Cravan in Picabia’s elegiac film
Entr’acte –
The fictions of Arthur Cravan concludes with the absent poet-boxer’s eventual casting off into a Surrealist legacy, and his becoming what metaphor is: a means to represent the world.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1 On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan
2 Enter Colossus
3 To be an American in Paris
4 ‘All words are lies’: Maintenant, April 1912–July 1913
5 ‘Life has no solution’: Maintenant, November 1913–April 1915
6 The vision of a struggling movement: Barcelona 1916
7 'Pure affect': New York 1917
8 Being as being, and nothing more
Conclusion
Index
