Elza Adamowicz 
Dada bodies [EPUB ebook] 
Between battlefield and fairground

This is the first comprehensive study of bodily images in Dada. Travelling between the international centres of the movement, from Zurich to Berlin, Paris to New York, it examines a diverse range of media, including art, literature, performance, photography and film. Its overall approach is to confront Dada’s bodily images not as organic unities but as fictions that reflect on the disjunctive, dehumanised society of war-torn Europe. These fictions occupy an ambivalent space between the battlefield (in their satirical exposure of ideology) and the fairground (in their playful manipulation and joyful renewal of the body). The book features analyses of works by Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Hannah Höch, Marcel Duchamp and others, and will appeal to scholars and students of European history, cultural history, art and literature.

Table of Content

1 Introduction: spare parts
2 Zurich Dada: between gas mask and carnival dance
3 Shooting the classical body
4 Hybrid bodies (I): the impossible machine
5 Hybrid bodies (II): the grotesque
6 Performance spaces: fairground, cabaret, exhibition
7 Death and rebirth: corpse or chrysalis
8 Fluid bodies, shifting identities
9 Dada’s Africa
10 Limit-bodies
11 Conclusion: exquisite corpses
Index

About the author

Simona Storchi is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Leicester