The Fictions of Arthur Cravan

The legendary poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, a fleeting figure on the periphery of early twentieth-century European avant-gardism, is frequently invoked as proto-Dada and Surrealist exemplar. Yet he remains an insubstantial phenomenon, not seen since 1918, lost through historical interstices, clouded in drifting untruths. This study processes philosophical positions into a practical recovery from nineteenth-century Nietzsche to twentieth-century Deleuze with thoughts on subjectivity, metaphor, representation and multiplicity. From fresh readings and new approaches of Cravans first published work as a manifesto of simulation; of contributors to his Paris review Maintenant as impostures for the Delaunays; and of the conjuring of Cravan in Picabias elegiac film Entracte The fictions of Arthur Cravan concludes with the absent poet-boxers eventual casting off into a Surrealist legacy, and his becoming what metaphor is: a means to represent the world. -- .