u/mildgrandma

Hi everyone, I hope this is the right subreddit to ask, but if not, please kindly redirect me! I'm studying Breton's Manifestoes of Surrealism and I'm wondering what he means to say in this passage:

>Let me come back again to the waking state. I have no choice but to consider it a phenomenon of interference. Not only does the mind display, in this state, a strange tendency to lose its bearings (as evidenced by the slips and mistakes the secrets of which are just beginning to be revealed to us), but, what is more, it does not appear that, when the mind is functioning normally, it really responds to anything but the suggestions which come to it from the depths of that dark night to which I commend it. However conditioned it may be, its balance is relative. It scarcely dares express itself and, if it does, it confines itself to verifying that such and such an idea, or such and such a woman, has made an impression on it. What impression it would be hard pressed to say, by which it reveals the degree of its subjectivity, and nothing more. This idea, this woman, disturb it, they tend to make it less severe. What they do is isolate the mind for a second from its solvent and spirit it to heaven, as the beautiful precipitate it can be, that it is. When all else fails, it then calls upon chance, a divinity even more obscure than the others to whom it ascribes all its aberrations. Who can say to me that the angle by which that idea which affects it is offered, that what it likes in the eye of that woman is not precisely what links it to its dream, binds it to those fundamental facts which, through its own fault, it has lost? And if things were different, what might it be capable of? I would like to provide it with the key to this corridor.

I feel like the woman comes quite out of left field here. Is he arguing that women lack the dreaming capabilities of men? Is he relating the waking state to women (and later the dream state to men as he follows this passage with, "The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him")?

Thank you in advanced for any help.

hi everyone! I'm currently rereading Mitchell's essay, "Word and Image," and I am having difficulty wrapping my head around what he's trying to say. so far, I think he's arguing that text and image are essentially on the same level with text being able to function as image and vice versa. I guess that sounds simple enough, but somehow this idea of the "imagetext" is stumping me a little bit.

when I first encountered this essay last semester, my professor had us look at Chelsea Biondolillo's "#Lovesong" as an example of imagetext, but I was a little lost on how to apply Mitchell's theory here exactly and was still too shy to ask if my prof could explain her reading choice further.

if anyone is familiar with Mitchell, your help would be greatly appreciated!