What is surrealism? A literary movement, it is true, but something which has also contaminated the plastic arts, cinema and photography, and has also ventured into politics. In a 100 words Jean-Pierre Bertrand (ULg) and Paul Aron (ULB) render all of its diversity and richness.

A professor at the University of Liège’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures), Jean-Pierre Bertrand did not hesitate for long before responding positively to an invitation made by the PUF (The University Presses of France); even if in recent times his research has tended to lead him towards the Symbolist movement and the end of the nineteenth century, he has for a long time studied Surrealism, which was the focus of his undergraduate dissertation (with Pascal Durand, supervised by Jacques Dubois). ‘I have got very heavily involved with this period, which fascinates me,’ explains Jean-Pierre Bertrand. ‘It was surrealism which relaunched literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, even if seemed to be running out of steam with a Symbolism which was in its interminable death throes. There was a radical overhaul with innovative projects in every direction, and which went far beyond the strict framework of poetry to rethinking from top to bottom the very categories of life, no more nor less. It was an exceptional case of group structuring. The blossoming of Surrealism is of course intimately connected to the personality of André Breton. He held the group together up until his death in 1966, despite a great many schisms. There exist few cases in francophone literary history of such a structured organization.’