Definition
Nadja (1928), by André Breton (1896–1966), is one of the major novels of Paris, and of Surrealism, deeply influenced by Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and by Louis Aragon, whose Paris Peasant had appeared in instalments between 1924 to 1926. In its turn, it influenced Philippe Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris (1928). It is a document of Surrealism, and deeply influential on all work which has explored the everyday, and the idea of the dérive, drifting through the city in walking, an idea associated with Guy Debord. In that sense, it is formative for thinking about cities, as it is also definitional for Surrealism. Nadja was revised in 1962, but this article discusses the 1928 edition.
Breton and Surrealism
André Breton, Normandy-born, studied medicine and served in neuropsychiatric centers during WWI, at Nantes, where he encountered Jacques Vaché, who appears in Nadja(37) and then, for much of 1916, at Saint-Dizier, where he worked under the influence of Emmanuel Regis...
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Bibliography and Further Reading
Beaudelaire, Charles. 1857. Les Fleurs du mal. Paris. Auguste Poulet-Malassis.
Becker, Annette. 2000. The avant-garde, madness, and the great war. Journal of Contemporary History 35: 71–84.
Breton, André. 1960. Nadja. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press.
Breton, André. 1969. Manifestoes of surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Breton, André. 1987. Mad love. Trans. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln: Bison Press.
Burgin, Victor. 1990. Chance encounters: Flâneur and Détraquée in Breton’s Nadja. Qui Parle 4: 47–61.
Cardinal, Roger. 1986. Breton: Nadja. London: Grant and Cutler.
Caws, Mary Ann. 1996. André Breton. New York: Twayne.
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Herheck, Mariah Devereux. 2008. André Breton’s Nadja: a vagabonde in a femme fatale’s narrative. Dalhousie French Studies 82: 163–171.
Kemp, Simon. 2018. Figuring the mind: Representing consciousness from proust to the present, 56–77. London: Routledge.
Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The ethics of psychoanalysis. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge.
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Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 2002. Loving Freud madly: Surrealism between hysterical and paranoid modernism author(s). Journal of Modern Literature 25: 58–74.
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Tambling, J. (2020). Nadja: André Breton. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_189-1
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