author (1915-1997)
I have never been able to draw a line between work and pleasure.
ANNA BALAKIAN
New York Times, August 15, 1997
The object of linguistics is language; that of poetics is concrete utterance. Language is an institution, a formal system which constitutes, for the hypothetical speaker, a "competence"; it is a virtual object. Speech (the poetic utterance, for our purposes) is an individual act which formulates a concrete discourse; it is a "performance".
ANNA BALAKIAN
The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages
Surrealism has come to have two meanings: it was originally the closely-knit spiritual union of artists and writers who operated under the common trademark, worked out their artistic problems together, wrote for the same periodicals, sometimes even collaborated on works. But ... in its broader sense it represents a spiritual crisis that stems from the ideological developments of the nineteenth century, and has succeeded in producing a technique of writing and painting that conveys a materio-mystical vision of the universe.
ANNA BALAKIAN
Surrealism
Art, even as poetry, was to become not an escape from the narrowness of lived reality, but the overflow of intensified life.
ANNA BALAKIAN
Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute
Literature is an act which gives meaning to experience.
ANNA BALAKIAN
The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages
Blake has been admired by the surrealists because like them he made of poetry a way of life: his pictorial and poetic imagery was the overflow of a spiritual crisis and his art asserted man's creative capacities.
ANNA BALAKIAN
Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute
If in the Naturalist's eye man is a product of chemistry, the symbolist's world of ineffable forces is just as totally, though somewhat more somberly, controlled. For the symbolists, the forests of symbols, casually mentioned by Baudelaire in a little sonnet to which he himself attributed very little importance, is an inescapable labyrinth from which man cannot liberate his imagination; this is much the same situation in which the Naturalists place the human personality when they judge it powerless to overcome its physical and social limitations.
ANNA BALAKIAN
Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute
Symbolism, originally intended as a countermovement to naturalism, actually turned out to be a variation of it rather than its antithesis.
ANNA BALAKIAN
Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute
Surrealist art is very far removed from the abstract or from so-called pure art, which on the contrary dematerializes the object into an idea. It also becomes quite evident that the artist has wandered far from symbolism and impressionism. The generalized role that the symbol bestows on the concrete is the exact reverse of the character of the surrealist art object which is a study in the particular delivering the object from its general role to bestow on it a specialized new one.
ANNA BALAKIAN
Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute
The artist's mind and eye, as the poet's, were subjected to rigorous training. Henceforth, the artist's hands were to create the objects projected from his mind, after its process of selection and alchemy.
ANNA BALAKIAN
Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute
The ideal of musicality belongs to the stylistic layer of Symbolism, for music in literature is a function of language, of style. It is the stylistic element which is the most deeply rooted in the aesthetics and value-hierarchy of the Symbolist movement, and one which graphically illustrates the interrelatedness of ideas and of style, and the possibility of expressing ideas through the medium of art.
ANNA BALAKIAN
The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages