Technologically,
creating a WebQuest can be very simple. As long as you can create a document
with hyperlinks, you can create a WebQuest. That means that a WebQuest can be
created in Word, Powerpoint, and even Excel! If you're going to call it a
WebQuest, though, be sure that it has all the critical attributes. A real WebQuest....
is wrapped
around a doable and interesting task that is ideally a scaled down version
of things that adults do as citizens or workers.
requires
higher level thinking, not simply summarizing. This includes synthesis,
analysis, problem-solving, creativity and judgment.
makes good use
of the web. A WebQuest that isn't based on real resources from the web is
probably just a traditional lesson in disguise. (Of course, books and
other media can be used within a WebQuest, but if the web isn't at the
heart of the lesson, it's not a WebQuest.)
isn't a
research report or a step-by-step science or math procedure. Having
learners simply distilling web sites and making a presentation about them
isn't enough.
isn't just a
series of web-based experiences. Having learners go look at this page,
then go play this game, then go here and turn your name into hieroglyphs
doesn't require higher level thinking skills and so, by definition, isn't
a WebQuest.
To
speak of the techniques of surrealist poetry is necessarily to speak of
the theory behind their practice, a theory that is unique in literature
because it transcends literature and art altogether and invades the
domains of philosophy, psychology, and even politics. In fact, as we
will see, surrealism is essentially a technique and an inquiry utilizing
that technique as a key to unlock the limitless within the human mind,
effecting an essentially spiritual liberation. (Or so the story
goes.) I will summarize this theory, indicate the emphasis on chance
and spontaneity in the techniques, and finally discuss the validity of
surrealism as an approach to literature.
Surrealism as a movement in literature had its formal beginning with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by André Breton in 1924. Prior to that, in 1919, the first automatic text, The Magnetic Fields, was produced by Breton and Philippe Soupault. In his first manifesto Breton explicitly defines surrealism as
"psychic automatism in its pure state" -- the purpose of which is to
express and thus reveal "the true functioning of thought."1 There
is a need, of course, to discuss the signal importance of this claim --
that is, if the claim has any meaning, and if the techniques prescribed
by surrealism achieve what it purported of them. Insofar as western
civilization (and thus our very lives) is practically built on thought
(or was built, and is sustained, by the activities of thought -- to an
extent to be determined by the very phenomenological inquiry that
surrealism intends to be), then surely it is important to look into
surrealism, its basic concepts, to see what is there. And this is quite
apart from the curiosity one might have about the various techniques
employed by the surrealist poet; though in fact an understanding of the
concepts lends credibility to the techniques and thus one begins to
regard them in the light of their own purported expansive possibilities.
The concept of surreality is
that of a reality "higher" than that to which we are accustomed: the
reality of "waking consciousness."This surreality is proposed as a
unity of the world of waking reality and that of dream; of objectivity
and subjectivity; of world and imagination or mind; etc. In another
important work, The Communicating Vessels (1931), Breton expresses this plainly enough: "the world of dream and the real world are one and the same."2 The
analogy contained in the title is that the mind and the world are not
separate but are continuously "communicating" like two connected
"vessels."
At the "living center" of the unity of surreality is a sublime point --
or "the point sublime" -- with which some part of the human mind
communicates directly. In these terms, then, surrealism's aim can be
said to be the development of a consciousness of this communication, and
therefore a realization of the surreal unity.3 This is
implied by the interest in thought, especially in thought freed from the
usual constraints of convention, logic, morality, the concern for
producing aesthetic beauty, and various other forms of
repression. Logic and tradition are seen by the surrealists to
drastically limit thought and imagination -- and thus experience,
consciousness, and behavior. The essence of this delimiting is what
Breton called "the great enigma" -- "the permanent cause of the conflict
that exists between man and the world" -- and this is just "the
impossibility of justifying everything by the logical."4 Logic,
in this view, attempts to rule in the conscious mind and in that narrow
field of reality which it allows to enter consciousness; but logic is
necessarily frustrated, since the functioning of logic requires a
language which separates the subject from the object. Besides division
as a natural operation of thought as it is normally used (and in
surrealist use the word seeks to unify -- for Breton, "words make
love"), however, there is also a movement toward security which keeps us
safely within the confines of the familiar, the known, the
conventional. Breton criticized contemporary thought for its
"extravagant overestimation oft he known compared with what remains to
be known," since knowledge is purely a function of memory and ceases to
have anything to do with reality (which changes).5 "The key
to the mental prison" -- and thus the device for the liberation of
thought -- was to be found in "the free, unlimited play of analogies"
which alone can break the "paltry means of cognition" that ordinarily
prevent us from "associating . . . the unassociable," and by "breaking
without discrimination that which we do not dare to wish to see broken."6Hence
we have the spontaneous juxtaposition, the unthought-of combination,
the starling simile, which was actually a device of Dadaist poetry and
an element in the work of Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire,
precursors of surrealism. In opening up thought, then, by sitting
down to write automatically, having an intention only to record what
comes into the mind spontaneously, without fear as to what might arise
from the hidden depths of the subconscious -- in relinquishing control
over one's own thought, one creates a channel for the "verbal
manifestation" of "the cosmic Word" (no less!).7 To delineate this radical jump, we have the notion of objective chance,
which is the discovery of a natural link between the personal,
collective, and even "cosmic" unconsciousness, such as occurs with the find (trouvaille), or found object.8 (A
surrealist will sometimes find an object which seizes his attention
with its uniqueness or with the uniqueness or unusualness of its
situation or context -- from which the function of the object, if
man-made, would be a puzzle; or it might be a rock or a piece of wood
bearing suggestive markings; or anything extraordinary or
coincidental. Such objects would be incorporated into the surrealists'
sculptures, montages, collages, or be displayed as "ready-makes,"
etc.) The find represents the communication of the vessels of mind and
world through the intersection of desire and change at a particular
point in time and space.9 In the case of automatic writing,
it is the word that is "found" -- a voice is given to Chance. And since
the point sublime is "the secret source of objective chance," then
surely the automatically written words are manifestations of the cosmic
Word.10 (The Greeks, paradoxically, identified the Word with
logic -- or vice versa -- at any rate that which the surrealist has to
escape or suspend in order to receive the "new" word as a
revelation.) It was André Breton's belief that the "evidence" arrived
at through surrealist "research" (as he termed the results and
utilization of automatism and other experimental techniques) was
profoundly meaningful in its revealing some truth about the nature of
thought and of the relationship between the mind and the supreme point
and that between the supreme point and the specific present reality,
etc. A necessary concomitant of this belief is that literature and
art should serve as tools for a surrealist revolution -- primarily
conceived as a revolution in consciousness, entailing the infinite
expansion of reality by the growing realization of the coming-together
of mind and matter, the absolute and the specific, etc. And yet,
despite the profound relevance or liberating nature of their
transcriptions, the surrealist writers were themselves no more than
"modest recording instruments." Conceiving of poetry in this way, it was
only logical that "Breton subscribed without question to the opinion
that poetic excellence can only be the result of spontaneity."11 If
not spontaneous -- i.e., produced using surrealist techniques -- then
obviously it could not be related to surreality and thus to the
ever-present point sublime. (For we can only posit a center if we posit
a circumference, i.e., a surface; the present would then be nothing
more than the temporal manifestation of that absolute sublime, which
seems to be the position of Zen Buddhism -- which likewise denies the
separation of self and object: deny, in fact, the existence of either
self or object, seeing them as apparitions, the products of
thought.) With the introduction of the absolute, all values shift, and
art must be judged, if at all, by its revelatory power.12
Let
us now look at some of the other forms of automatism that were used in
surrealist "research." The best-known technique after automatic writing
was the modified children's game known as "the exquisite corpse." This
involved several people consecutively writing entire lines or parts of a
sentence without being able to see what others have written. The name
comes from the first result of this method (in 1925): "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau" -- "the exquisite corpse drinks the new wine."13Another
method was the drawing of words from a hat after they had been cut out
of a newspaper article of the desired length. The words were copied in
that sequence.14
Akin to the automatic texts were those
produced as dream transcriptions and those that resulted from
"spiritualist séances" conducted by Breton (which sometimes involved
hypnotism) and even from sleep-writing. Robert Desnos was the most
gifted in all of these experiments, demonstrating the greatest facility,
and was also able to speak "automatically." There were sleep-dialogues
that sometimes became violent. Desnos, Breton, and probably many of
the others experimented with opium and other drugs, which is only
logical considering their essentially psychedelic (i.e.,
"mind-revealing") pursuit and the pervading spirit of experimentation.
In
closing, let me return to the question of validity concerning
surrealist literary techniques, about which there has probably been
considerable controversy. First of all, if we adopt a surrealist
viewpoint, then, as we have seen, art logically must be and naturally
will tend to be surrealist, and thus be justifiable only in its ability
to reveal the new, the "never seen," the parallel activity of thought
and chance in consciousness. But if we reject the surrealist position,
then the poetry cannot be judged on the basis of usual aesthetic
standards, simply because it was theoretically created without concern
for any such standards. Therefore, surrealist poetry is exempt from
aesthetic judgment. More important by far -- infinitely more important,
perhaps -- is the response that arise in the individual who tries to
openly experience the work as "evidence" in the case for the sublime as
the living center of the surreal unity of psyche and "external reality,"
of inside and outside.
Notes
1 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 28.
2 Quoted in J. H. Matthews, André Breton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 13.
3 Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism and the Literary Imagination (The Hague and Paris: Mouton & Co., 1966), p. 46.
4 See Matthews, op cit., p. 27.
5 Ibid. p. 19.
6 Ibid. p. 27.
7 Michel Carrouges, André Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism, trans. Maura Prendergast (University of Alabama Press, 1974), p. 56.
8 Ibid. p. 7.
9 Matthews, p. 32.
10 Carrouges, p. 199.
11 Matthews, p. 30.
12 Cf. "Art must draw its justification 'solely from its revelatory power'" (Breton), Matthews, p. 28.
13 Herta Wescher, Collage, trans. Robert Wolf (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1968), p. 194-5.
14 Ibid.,
p. 134. Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists used this technique before the
surrealists were "surrealists." Poe, even earlier, suggested a very
similar technique in his instructions for "How to Write a Blackwood
Article."
Y hablando de Literatura, el Surrealismo creía en la existencia de otra realidad y en el pensamiento libre. Plasmó un mundo absurdo, ilógico, donde la razón no puede dominar al subconsciente. Tomó del Dadaísmo, la importancia del azar y la rebeldía, pero rechazó su carácter negativo y destructivo. Posteriormente buscó inspiración en el inconsciente, la imaginación, el método de la escritura automática y el estudio de las teorías del psicoanálisis de Freud. En la literatura generó una revolución en el lenguaje y la aportación de nuevas técnicas de composición. El audiovisual que se propone a continuación te ayudará a fijar los términos fundamentales que definieron este movimiento.
Todas las características enunciadas en el artículo pueden observarse también en la poesía surrealista, como ocurre en ese ejemplo de David Mainar Crespo:
Enlace para visitar la página web:
http://www.catedu.es/arablogs/blog.php?id_blog=2352&id_articulo=159505
1- La página que explica las reglas de ortografía, ¿ha sido actualizada alguna vez?
2- ¿Cuántas reglas ortográficas aparecen en el texto?
3-¿Cuándo deben escribirse dobles la "s", la "l" y la "f"?
4- ¿Cómo se forman los plurales regulares?
5- ¿De qué regla son la excepción las palabras café y comité?
6- Generalmente, ¿qué letra debe aparecer al final de la palabra, "y" o "i"?
Responde verdadero o falso
1- Cuando la palabra termina en "e", la vocal anterior se pronuncia igual a la pronunciación del alfabeto.
2- El sonido "ck" no puede aparecer al final de la palabra.
3- Las palabras que terminan en "o" precedidas por una consonante, suelen formar su plural con el morfema "os" al final.
4- Por lo general la letra "i" aparece antes de la "e" cuando se pronuncia "ee".
5-El morfema "ous" al final de una palabra equivale a decir "carente de".
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