Dali and Postmodernism: This Is Not an Essence

By taking Dali's "paranoic-critical method" to the ends that Dali himself advocated, LaFountain (sociology, State U. of West Georgia) shows that Dali's Surrealism anticipates tactics practiced by postmodern and poststructuralist critics. In particular, LaFountain advances the notion that "phantom meaning" displaced Surrealism's "phantom object," thereby creating a crisis of the subject and the object far in excess of that sought by Surrealist revolutionaries. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.