Masks and puppets: Metamorphosis and depersonalization in European avant-garde art criticism, 1915--1939

This dissertation consists of an effort to address metamorphosis and the experience of depersonalization as the main preoccupations of avant-garde art criticism of the interwar Europe. More specifically, it traces the ways in which theoreticians around Surrealism -- Carl Einstein, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Walter Benjamin and Roger Caillois -- formulated the link between metamorphosis as a formal, plastic phenomenon and modalities of depersonalization. By looking at Einstein's critical writings on African, Melanesian and Japanese art; Bataille's and Leiris's ethnologically-informed review Documents; Benjamin's historical anthropology of children's toys and auto-ethnography of childhood; Caillois's phantasmagorical entomology; and the multivalent Surrealist review Minotaure, the dissertation demonstrates the degree to which the avant-garde discourse on metamorphosis and depersonalization depends on the intersection of the artistic and anthropological spheres. In particular, it shows the ways in which avant-garde criticism understood masks, puppets and other inhuman figurations in conjunction with depersonalized states, ranging from socialized ritual transformation; mimetic identification in mysticism; playful animism in childhood; temporary self-dissociation in dream; even organic emaciation in (animal) psychasthenia and (human) psychosis.