“The Exquisite Corpse: The Game as a Practice of Surrealist Writing”

“The Exquisite Corpse: The Game as a Practice of Surrealist Writing” — the first session of the course “Theory and Practice of Experimental Writing”

Experimental writing is a set of artistic practices that deconstruct classical narrative and work closely with the language and form of the text.
In this course, we will explore avant-garde and (post)modernist works, experiment with synesthesia and the libido of the artistic text, write our own manifesto, and learn how to expand the boundaries of narrative prose through image-based experimentation.

At the first session, we will discuss why experimental writing matters today, explain how the course will be structured, and get to know one another.
We will refer to poet Bhanu Kapil’s “12 Questions” and play a collective game that arose among the Surrealists in the mid-1920s. According to Simone Breton’s recollections, this is how the game unfolded:

“At first, we simply played with words. Each person wrote a phrase, folded the paper, and passed it to the next participant, who continued without seeing what came before, and so on. In one of the first games in which Prévert took part, we ended up with the phrase: ‘The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine.’ We liked it so much that it became the name of the game.”