The Re-Enchantment of Surrealism: Remedios Varo’s Visionary Artists

The visionary prowess of the artist was established, in both the visual and verbal arts, by the Symbolists in Fin de siècle France. This article asserts a continuity between the avowed spiritual dimension of their work and the visionary power of surrealist art asserted—despite strong resistance from the centre—by a group of renegade surrealists in the 1920s and beyond. To do so, it explores the artists that Spanish-born Mexican painter Remedios Varo (1908 – 1963) depicts in her work, demonstrating how they might be better understood when analysed in relation to Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff’s (1866?-1949) esoteric aesthetics. In doing so, it reveals a neglected, postsecular trajectory in the history of surrealism.

Finding a Scientific Voice: Performing Science, Space and Speech in the Nineteenth Century

Taking as a point of departure recent scholarly interest in the geographies of spoken communication, this paper situates the cultivation of a scientific voice in a range of nineteenth-century contexts and locations. An examination of two of the century’s most celebrated science lecturers, Michael Faraday and Thomas Henry Huxley, offers a basis for more general claims about historical relations between science, speech and space. The paper begins with a survey of the ‘ecologies’ of public speaking in which advocates of science sought to carve out an effective niche. It then turns to a reconstruction of the varying and variously interpreted assumptions about authoritative and authentic speech that shaped how the platform performances of Faraday and Huxley were constructed, contested and remediated in print. Particular attention is paid to sometimes clashing ideals of vocal performance and paralinguistic communication. This signals an interest in the performative 2 dimensions of science lectures rather more than their specific cognitive content. In exploring these concerns, the paper argues that ‘finding a scientific voice’ was a fundamentally geographical enterprise driven by attempts to make science resonate with a wider oratorical culture without losing distinctive appeal and special authority