Constructive thinking.

Constructive thinking.

This course provides intensive thinking practice for attaining a high level of  plunging into a particular work of art in order to become an intelligible, confident, creative playwright. Students are required to read the assigned texts carefully before the class in which they are to be discussed. Students will be exposed to exhaustive and wearying writing activity. Reading assignments are subject to change! Three exercises are to be passed through for each reading assignment. Class attendance is mandatory.

Other requirements: No yawning or snoring in class!

Exercise 1. Esthetic and colloquial synthesis*. 

The goal of this exercise is to help students perceive the most important aspects of a book, including exposure of environment, character, mood.

Description:

Students will take a story, or a certain chapter of a prose work and transform it into a play.

Exercise 2. An interview

The goal of this exercise is attaining a deeper understanding of character, providing him/her with additional sensuality, abilities and vividness.

Description:

Students will be required to write an imaginary interview with every character of the book.

Exercise 3. Constructive satirism.

This method of criticism is developed by the author of the present syllabus as a reaction against psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist criticism and Lesbian/gay criticism.

The goal of this exercise is to teach students to find plot holes in order to avoid them if, hopefully, they actually finish this course and go into the real world of playwrights.

Description.

Students will be required to search through the book and find equivocal phrases, indicate them and suggest solutions for eliminating ambiguity.

                                                                                                                                           

*See examples below. Examples are based on Grimms’ version of the fairy tale Little Red Head.

Example 1. Esthetic and colloquial synthesis

Act one,  Scene I.

The village house surrounded by woods. The acting area is the porch of the house. This is Red Cap’s house. The door leading from the porch to a dirty trashed kitchen is open. There is a hammock hung between two trees with a neglected book on it and an ashtray full of cigar butts.* It is the beginning of dawn. Stage director may want to  add a rooster’s crow. As the curtain rises, Mother and Red Cap, countrywomen, are standing on the porch. Mother’s look is very untidy, she is wearing a dirty apron over her peasant dress and dirty worn wicker shoes. Red Cap’s look, to the contrary, is neat and pleasing to the eye. She is wearing a clean apron and her wicker shoes are tidy.

A  wolf howl is heard in the distance.