Michael Richardson Quotes

#1. We can sum up the surrealist distinction between 'literature' and 'poetry' by saying where the former is artificial, fictive and elusive, the latter is natural, real, direct and spontaneous.

Michael Richardson

#2. The shifting sands of the world ... show how much the surrealists were drawn towards an interrogation of what reality actually is. Unlike fabulists of whatever hue, there is a materiality in surrealist writing that resolutely keeps it, one might say, 'down to earth'.

Michael Richardson

#3. Surrealism, then, neither aims to subvert realism, as does the fantastic, nor does it try to transcend it. It looks for different means by which to explore reality itself.

Michael Richardson

#4. The form of the Gothic novel also implicitly contested the claims of Realism to reflect the world directly by showing how artificial its structure was.

Michael Richardson

#5. Refusing what Adorno called that 'comfort in the uncomfortable' taken by the fantastic, surrealism seeks to reintegrate man into the universe.

Michael Richardson

#6. Surrealism also refuses the representation of reality: reality can only be; its existence proves its reality. Fiction thereby becomes impossible or is, by definition, false.

Michael Richardson