Abstract
Breton and Bataille, two people live in the same age find it difficult to tolerate each other, crash, with their works, in the world of literature. Breton attacks Bataille’s base materialism in his “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” and Bataille in turn argues that the surrealists suffered from an “Icarian complex” in his Visions of Excess. My chief aim of this thesis is to, by analyzing Breton’s surrealist romance Nadja and Bataille’s erotic novel Story of the Eye, map out how they treat desire and female body differently in the modern city.
My first chapter, “Breton, Bataille, Duchamp and Desire” is an introduction, through the analysis of Duchamp’s artistic work in order to delineate how Breton and Bataille treat the desire. The Second Chapter “Breton and the City of Paris” is the thorough study of Breton’s aimless strolling at Paris in Nadja. I attempt to, by treating Breton as the flaneur in the city of Paris, connect this aimless strolling to his surrealist mind. In chapter three I move on to the study of the heroine Nadja and her relation to both the photographs in this novel and Breton. After the study of Nadja, I do the investigation of Bataille’s Story of the Eye in the fourth chapter, “The Eye and Transgression”. It is basically a prologue to my final analysis of this two works. In order to understand how Breton’s signifying chain working, we have to study how the Bataillean one working. Therefore, the attempt of chapter four is, through the study of the Bataillean way of transgression, pave the way to understand Breton’s mind as a surrealist. Chapter five and the conclusion, “The Unachievable Corporal Incorporation: Breton’s Surreal Beauty” sums up all my studies on Breton and Bataille. The difference of the way they threat desire and female body in the signifying chain is the kernel of this chapter.

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