Lesson 3

 

Objective:

To introduce students to the surrealist understanding of automatism, and to have them experiment with automatism in their own writing.  This will be followed by a lesson that will allow them compare how automatism was used in both surrealist writing and film. This lesson should lead students to consider how surrealists perceive time and order.

 

Procedure:

Today students will continue to practice and expand their understanding of automatism. Begin class by having student’s sit in groups of four. Have one student take out a sheet of paper. Then explain to them that they are going to play a game called “Exquisite Corpse.”  The exquisite corpse is a surrealist game, in which each student writes a sentence, folds the paper so that their sentence is hidden and then passes their paper to the next person to continue in the same manner. Have them do this for five minutes. If successful the students should have an accumulation of unrelated sentences that should represent the unconscious thoughts of the group. Then have a representative from each group read their final product to the rest of the class. The whole activity should take approximately fifteen minutes. Background information and a good description of this activity can be found at this “Cadavre Exquis” webpage.

 

 

Next, ask students to take out their automatism writing assignment from the night before. Then have the students stand up in a circle. Ask one student who feels comfortable sharing their thoughts to stand outside the circle and read their assignment out loud. They should read their thoughts slowly and steadily as if they were one fluid thought. The first time they read, have everyone listen silently. The second time he reads, have the students in the circle strike a pose each time he describes a new thought.  The students should try to choose a pose that they believe represents the specific thought or idea that the students is reading. At the end of this reading, the students should count how many times they had to strike a different pose.  This number will represent the number of time the reader changed his train of thought.  Ask them if they think there was an order to their poses. Were the reader’s thoughts linear? Could they draw relationships and connections between the different poses, which were being used to represent the readers thought pattern?

 

Finally, for the last five minutes of class ask students how they felt about these two assignments. Did they feel that the “Exquisite Corpse” game limited their reality or represented a sense of their group’s subconscious truths? How did they feel during their automatism writing assignment? Was it difficult for them to write fluidly without the interruption of thoughts? How did their assignments read, did they seem nonsensical? Why or why not?