No one knew better than Walter Benjamin that criticism is a constellation between present and past, and the history of his reception enacts what his critical writings proclaim. Among the favorite Benjamins in circulation are a mystical Benjamin, a deconstructionist Benjamin, a Marxist Benjamin, and, of course, a Benjamin whose attraction lies precisely in his resistance to critical appropriation. If Benjamin's affinities with surrealism are also noticed, they are considered less important. But perhaps this is because surrealism itself occupies a somewhat equivocal status within contemporary critical discourse, as critics are put off by the inconsistent, frivolous facade of surrealist texts. This dissertation addresses the neglected surrealist content of Benjamin's thought by studying surrealism's neglected interest in social reality. The surrealists' detailed yet somewhat cavalier treatment of Parisian topography does not, as is so often asserted, subordinate social concerns to the imagination but rather reformulates the relation between literary text and social reality following modernism's challenge to mimesis. Using Marxist and Freudian theories of representation in this reformulation, surrealism provides Benjamin with a model for post-modern cultural criticism.

The dissertation first considers the Marxist issues underwriting Louis Aragon's decision to set Le Paysan de Paris in a Parisian arcade and then turns to Andre Breton's Nadja, Les Vases communicants, and L'Amour fou. It explains how Breton uses a Freudian understanding of representation to theorize Aragon's subjective approach to social concerns, discussing also Breton's interest in Paris as a realm of repressed collective material. The second part of the dissertation considers the importance of Breton's ghostly Paris for Benjamin's Einbahnstrase and Das Passagen-Werk. It discusses how Benjamin's concept of Erfahrung is inspired by the Bretonian rencontre, addressing also Benjamin's interest in the phantasmagoria. At once evoking hallucinatory mental activity and Marx's camera obscura of ideology, the phantasmagoria becomes a meta-concept in Benjamin's writings on Paris, expressing his Marxist-Freudian understanding of the relation between ideological products and material reality in capitalist society.