"In Passing": Breton, Bataille, and the Body in the Modern City

Breton and Bataille, two people live in the same age find it difficult to tolerate each other, clash, with their works, in the world of literature. Breton attacks Bataille’s base materialism in his “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” and Bataille in turn argues that the surrealists suffered from an “Icarian complex” in his Visions of Excess. My chief aim of this book is to, by analyzing Breton’s surrealist romance Nadja and Bataille’s erotic novel Story of the Eye, map out how they treat desire and female body differently in the modern city.