A workshop with the title 'Get Real about Being Surreal: Workshop on Sur/Real Art” will be offered on Friday April 24th, 2015, by Dr. Despina-Alexandra Constantinidou.
The workshop is going to take place at School of English Library (New Philosophy Building 3rd floor) between 18:00-20:00.
***A certificate of attendance will be provided***
NOTE:
Please bring an everyday object with you. You'll be asked to use it during the workshop as a prompt.
The places available for this workshop are limited. So if you're interested in attending, please forward your emails to:
ellikara@enl.auth.gr and kkostakis@enl.auth.gr.
This event is organized in collaboration with the School of English Book Club 'Transparent Windows.' For more information about our group please click on the following link: http://www.enl.auth.gr/trans_windows_en.html
ÅVENT ABSTRACT
Ever since the first manifesto of surrealism in 1924, the art movement that professed mixing reality with the dream-world has provided strong impetus for the exploration of art, film, literature, poetry, theatre, in ways that transgress artistic and aesthetic conventions. Placing the concept of reality under scrutiny, surreal art has revolutionalised our artistic and everyday life norms, which is one of the reasons why its modernist legacy still runs strong in our postmodern world. This workshop will investigate surreal art and its not-entirely-severed links with reality. It will also examine the surrealist project of blurring the boundaries between sanity and madness, not only by inviting the “art of the insane” in the artistic establishment, but also through theorising about the illegitimacy of “logically” excluding “otherness” from art. Workshop activities will target the im/possibility of writing automatically, that is without the intervention of thought, as well the im/possibility of viewing specific ab/normal mental states, like paranoia, as artistic discourse. All in all, this interactive seminar aims at engaging participants into questioning how surreal reality is, and vice versa.
BIO
Despina-Alexandra Constantinidou holds a BA and MA on English literature from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her doctoral thesis is entitled Paranoia from Salvador Dali to Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and Culture in the 1930s. It focuses on the interface between Lacan’s early writings and Dali’s essays and art within the broader cultural context of the 1930s, as well as on the significance of their interaction for literary theory. Her research interests and publications revolve around the history of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, semiotics and literary theory in general, and cultural products ranging from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past to surrealist art. She has taught courses on poetry, fiction, and academic writing in the School of English, AUTh, Greece, and has worked as an assistant editor and proofreader in various publications, as well as for the AUTh website. She currently teaches in secondary education, experimenting with CLIL methodology and the cultural studies approach to education, as well as working towards an American Studies curriculum, after being awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 2014.
