Creative Writing Commons^™

Madonna, Monster And Other Stories: Surrealist Short Fiction, Katherine Skvorak

Honors College

Surrealist literature has a long history of excluding female writers from the conversation, and as a result, women surrealists often wrote to critique the male/female binary and examine the oppressive forces denying their work. Madonna, Monster and Other Stories acts as a continuation of the female surrealist legacy and a further exploration and critique of invisible authorities that govern societal standards, create belief systems, and control logic and reason. Using methods created by the surrealist movement, such as the Exquisite Corpse exercise, image collaging, and automatic writing, these stories embrace the unconscious, the dreamlike, and the uncanny to break down …