Lettrism

English

Alternative forms

• Letterism, lettrism

Etymology

French Lettrisme, ultimately from lettre (“letter”).

Proper noun

Lettrism

1. A French avant-garde art and literary movement established in the mid-1940s, owing inspiration to Dada and surrealism.

   Coordinate term: situationism

   • 1983, Tom McDonough, quoting Jean-Paul Curtay, Lettrism: A Neo-Dadaism?, quoted in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, MIT Press, published 2002, →ISBN, page 442:

     So if lettrism, like Dada, came out of a reaction against a world war, Lettrism did not remain a protest . . . [but became] an exaltation of permanently renewed arts, philosophy, scientific knowledge, technology; […]

   • 2006, Vincent Kaufmann, translated by Robert Bononno, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry, University of Minnesota Press, →ISBN:

     Isou's lettrism was the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk in the grip of decomposition, a project for the total destruction of art, that is, a project of total art, another avatar of what Mallarmé ironically referred to as the Book, […]

Further reading

• Lettrism on Wikipedia.Wikipedia