For Any Number of Players: Playing Surrealist Games for Creativity, Collaboration, and Change

Ruth Towne (Summer 2018)

From the movement’s inception in the 1920s, Surrealism championed the poetic and the revolutionary while opposing mechanisms of oppression. At the center of Surrealist revolution and practice were games—strategies of play that exploited chance and accident, subverted the rational, and liberated the imagination. Surrealist games were powerful mechanisms of collaboration and personal creativity. Though these games were sometimes derided, the poet Andre Breton said of the persistent playing of games: It is clear that to shut oneself off from game-playing, or at least from the play of the imagination as adult discipline prescribes it, is to undermine the best of one’s own humanity. In this seminar, we will review the poetic and revolutionary aims of Surrealism as we study Surrealist language games and strategies for making texts, creating collaboratively, and reinventing our world with our own poetry and prose.