This thesis analyzes the poetry and other writings of the Zurich and Berlin dadaists and the French surrealists in terms of the experience of shock, as discussed by Walter Benjamin in his work on Baudelaire. An effort will be made to examine in which ways the traumatic and indeed visceral impact of modernity is reflected and transformed in the literary works of dada and surrealism. The thematics of the branded body (sensations) and of colliding bodies (collisions) will be explored. Special emphasis will be placed on the image, as a realm in which subject-object binarism is momentarily suspended.
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