Surrealism and Grammar:
Creatively Reinvigorating the Classroom
Kevin Griffith
Columbus, OH
A paper presented at the
Sixth Annual Conference of the NCTE Assembly for the Teaching of
English Grammar,
July 27 & 28, 1995.
Pennsylvania College of Technology, Williamsport, PA.
As a poet who also teaches advanced English grammar for future teachers,
I am always looking for ways to bring the excitement of the creative writing
class to the grammar class. Every semester, it seems, the same students
who were so excited and motivated to learn creative writing dread the proposition
of having to take a state-mandated course in grammar. The key to making
this course stimulating, it seemed to me, was to import certain creative
techniques into the grammar course, techniques which would illustrate to
students the intrinsic excitement of language creation, an excitement shared
by both grammarians and poets, but one for which only the writers get the
notoriety and "glamour." In other words, I felt it was my duty to show
my students that doing grammar was as fun as making poetry, a feeling they
could pass along to their students. As the new collection of essays, The
Place of Grammar in Writing Instruction, points out, the future of
the teaching of grammar depends on teaching it affectively, getting students
to like grammar (Brosnahan & Neuleib 208). The best place to start
in a course is to get students to progress from their innate unconscious
grammar to conscious. To that end, it is important to provide "interactive
group tasks, which enable students to generate the patterns and structures
unconscious knowledge of the language" (Brosnahan & Neuleib 209). This
paper describes what I have found to be some useful strategies for tapping
that unconscious knowledge, language games borrowed from the French surrealists
poets and artists.
Surrealism, a movement started by Andre Breton, which had its origins
in the first world war, and which had its own manifesto by 1924, is noted
for its attempts to transcend logic, borrow the language of dreams, subvert
bourgeois notions of artistic taste and standards, and generally to fly
in the face of Western logic. The games invented by Breton and his followers
have the following characteristics:
They are freely entered into; separated from the run of ordinary ‘serious’
life, they are circumscribed by their own time and space; they are uncertain,
their outcomes not predetermined; they are economically unproductive and
not concerned with material interest, they are governed by rules; they
are associated with imaginative projection and make believe. (Gooding 11)
One notes in these characteristics the one seemingly anomalous one that,
just as language itself, the games are governed by specific rules. Chomsky’s
famous "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," which in itself has a surrealist
ring, demonstrates the rule-bound and yet, innate, structures which govern
language production. Surrealist games do the same, allowing students to
compose their own poems by adhering to a few rules.
The Exquisite Corpse
Perhaps the most famous surrealist game is "The Exquisite Corpse," named
after one of the noun phrases generated by the game. Classified as a "chain
game," the Corpse must be played by at least two people, preferably three.
The object of the game is for each of the players to follow a set sentence
pattern such as the following:
Indefinite or definite article, adjective, noun, transitive verb, article,
adjective, noun.
One person in the small group must write down, in column form, three versions
of the first three slots (article, adjective, noun); he or she then folds
the paper so that the next person cannot see what the writer has written.
The second person then writes three verbs, folds the paper again, and passes
it to the third person who writes out three versions of the final noun
phrases. The key is that in writing the words, each person must fold over
the paper so that the next person cannot see what the previous person has
written. When the paper is finally unfolded, students discover some witty,
yet strangely poignant lines which embody the surrealist spirit:
| Writer #1 |
Writer #2 |
Writer #3 |
| The exquisite corpse |
drinks |
the new wine. |
| A dying man |
drips |
the pale bird. |
| The dead fighter |
hammers |
the ghostly fog. |
As one can see, this activity underscores the underlying, mechanistic nature
of language. Though the poems may not make semantic sense, they do make
grammatical sense, and The Corpse is a particularly useful game when reviewing
form and structure classes. Of course, this activity can be varied to accommodate
different lesson plans. For instance, I had a number of students in my
advanced grammar course who, for some inexplicable reason, were confusing
prepositional phrases with direct objects. In this case, I had them construct
one "Corpse" poem using prepositional phrases in the final position, and
then one in which they had to generate a noun phrase in the direct object
slot. This variation also underscores the difference between transitive
and intransitive verbs.
Conditionals
In the game called "Conditionals," a pair of players take turns inventing
sentences which contain an opening adverbial clause beginning with "if"
or "when" and then a main clause in the conditional or future tense. Again,
the student writing the opening clause must fold over the paper so that
his or her partner can not see what is written. For instance, here is a
group of sentences my students generated with this activity:
If you never had to change your underwear,
you would have mail on Valentine’s Day.
If hearts gave birth,
then all the flowers in the world would die.
If I jumped out of the window,
ghost stories would come true.
If everyone ran around naked,
then I would sit upside down.
If tears were made of sand,
then water would rain back into the sky.
This game is not only valuable in teaching concepts such as conditional
tense, two-part subordination, etc..-- it can be used to discuss the issue
of putting a comma after a "presentence modifier," the error that Lunsford
and Conners in their 1988 study "Frequency of Formal Errors" identified
as the error marked most often by writing teachers. The problem of the
presentence modifier is also addressed in Rei Noguchi’s Grammar and
the Teaching of Writing (1991). His method is to transform declarative
sentences containing presentence modifiers into yes and no questions (57),
an effective method, but one which may confuse students because two operations
are required. In the "Conditionals" game, students need just to write the
sentences, rather than transform them into questions.
Other Activities
To review many major grammatical concepts, entire stories or poems can
be constructed in groups or collaboratively by the whole class by designing
exercises in which each student is instructed to produce a certain line
using a certain formula. For instance, one student might be asked to write
a sentence beginning with a gerund phrase, fold the paper and the pass
it to another student who writes a sentence containing a that-clause functioning
as a direct object, and so on. When each group or the class is finished,
they can then tinker with and rearrange the sentences to produce a poem
or story that has a surreal feel, but is held together by some narrative
thread.
Another option is to design a handout listing various instructions for
students to compose lines following certain grammatical structures. For
instance, one might ask students to write a ten-line poem following ten
specific steps such as "Create a metaphor using the following construction:
‘The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun). Jim Simmerman’s poem
"Moon Go Away, I Don’t Love You Anymore," was written using this activity.
Simmerman first wrote out twenty instructions to himself and then created
the poem by following those instructions (Simmerman 122). Here are the
first few lines from that poem:
"Moon Go Away. . ." was eventually published in Poetry, which illustrates
the generative power of this kind of activity.
Conclusion
Though I have used them only in college-level courses, I am sure that surrealist
games would be useful for almost all grade levels. They illustrates the
almost computer-like structure of grammar, while allowing students an enormous
amount of creative flexibility. Students are ostensibly writing poems,
but they are really "doing" grammar, understanding how the form and structure
of language coalesce in any language act.
Works Cited
Brotchie, Alastair. Surrealist Games. Boston: Shambala Redstone,
1993.
Brosnahan, Irene, and Janice Neuleib. "Teaching Grammar Affectively:
Learning to Like Grammar." The Place of Grammar in Writing Instruction:
Past, Present, Future. Edited by Susan Hunter and Ray Wallace. Portsmouth,
NH: Boyton/Cook: 204-212.
Conners, Robert J. and Andrea Lunsford. "Frequency of Formal Errors
in Current College Writing or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research." College
Composition and Communication (39):
Gooding, Mel. "Surrealist Games." Surrealist Games. Boston: Shambala
Redstone, 1993: 10-12.
Noguchi, Rei. Grammar and the Teaching of Writing. Urbana, IL:
NCTE, 1991.
Simmerman, Jim. "Twenty Little Poetry Projects." The Practice of
Poetry. Edited by Robin Behn & Chase Twichell. New York: Harper
Collins, 1992: 119-122.