Eventos y actividades culturales

CURSOS CICLO 2008

Lecture "Look Who's talking now: dialogue and the graduate" by Mark Axelrod

Tuesday August 19, 6.30 pm at ICANA Belgrano

3 de Febrero 821 Free entrance – seated limited – English level advanced

One of the most curious things about books written on screenwriting is that the majority of them (at least in the US) minimizes or totally ignores dialogue. This exclusion is rather extraordinary since silent films ended in 1927 so for almost eighty years we have been relying on dialogue to help carry the burden of the storyline. Yet if one takes a look at the books being written on screenwriting, the number of pages devoted to dialogue runs from zero at the low end to about twenty at the high end with the average being about six pages! Out of over twenty books I reviewed, only two books actually have anything over twenty pages devoted to dialogue and only one went beyond thirty. That lack of attention to dialogue immediately begs the question: Why? One answer may be that the majority of the people writing books on screenwriting don’t actually write screenplays nor do they write stage plays so their notion of what good dialogue sounds like and, more important, the techniques used to write good dialogue is extremely limited. So what sounds like good dialogue? Mark R. AXELROD is a Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English at Chapman University, Orange, California. He taught at the University of East Anglia, UK and as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is also the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing for which he has received 4 National Endowment for the Arts Grants. He is a two-time recipient of a United Kingdom Leverhulme Fellowship for Creative Writing (University of East Anglia, Edinburgh University), a three-time recipient of the Alliance Française National Writing Award, has written 17 novels including Capital Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 2000), Cloud Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1998), Cardboard Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1996) and Bombay California (Pacific Writers Press, 1994)) and has finished a new, Pan-Euro-American trilogy titled, The Posthumous Memoirs of Blase Kubash, excerpts of which have been anthologized in The Reading Room/4 published by Great Marsh Press. He is also writing a tetrology of short fictions, the first of which, Borges’ Travel, Hemingway’s Garage (2004, Fiction Collective 2). The follow-up, Balzac’s Coffee, DaVinci’s Ristorante, is completed and he has sketched two new collections, titled Melville’s Motors, Tolstoi’s Train, and Rabelais’ Hotel, Nietzsche’s Café. He has written other short fiction as Dante’s Foil & Other Sporting Tales and The Apotheosis of Aaron. He is currently finishing four new novels, How Abbie Goldman Got Laid in Venice, The Checks and Balances of Alfie Schiller, Aleatory, and The Sorrows of Seymour Schreibman. He has been published in numerous literary journals including the Iowa Review and the New York Quarterly New York avant-garde magazine, Splash. He was a film reviewer for Vinyl Magazine (Minneapolis). Among the awards he has won for his fiction include: the Tim McGinnis Award (University of Iowa); Camargo Foundation Fellowship in Fiction Writing, Cassis, France (2); the Maxwell Perkins Award for Fiction Writing, New York, NY; a Bush Foundation Fellowship for Fiction Writing, St. Paul, MN; and an Award for Experimental Writing (Indiana University). His plays include Ti Amo Lucia Olivetti (for which he received an award from Western Illinois University); Chips, Falling Where They May: Taxing Tales: An American Trilogy of new one-act plays including: Van Gogh’s Audit, Superman in America and Bruno Arlt at the Grill Café as well as the one-act play, Voltaire’s Ashes. He was recently given permission by the John Fowles estate to adapt Fowles’ novel, Mantissa, to the stage. He has translated several works. He is currently at work on a book of memoirs titled, Posthumous Papers of a Living.His critical books include, The Politics of Style in the Fiction of Balzac, Beckett and Cortázar (Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 1990); The Poetics of Novels (Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 1999). Other film books include: Aspects of the Screenplay (Heinemann, 2001); Character & Conflict: Cornerstones of Screenwriting (Heinemann, 2004); and I Read It at the Movies: Screen Adaptation (Heinemann, 2006). A fourth book, The Scene and How to Write It, will be published in 2010. Exhibitions of his artwork include: “Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write,” Chapman University, an exhibit of artwork by Mark Axelrod, Michel Butor, Jean Cocteau, JP Donleavy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Alasdair Gray and Henry Miller; University of Pennsylvania Library's Department of Special Collections Presents, "Networking Artists & Poets: Assemblings from the Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry."; Elmira College, Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY in conjunction with the International New Novel Conference (Group), among others. A member of CILECT and other film organizations, he is a practicing screenwriter and has been awarded for his work by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the Writers Guild of America, East; the Screenwriters Forum (University of Wisconsin); and the Sundance Institute. He has written over twenty screenplays and teleplays. As Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing from 1997 to the present he has received four NEA grants to host such inter/national writers as: Salman Rushdie; Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka; Luisa Valenzuela; Gioconda Belli; Alicia Partnoy; Hiber Conteris; Raymond Federman; Steve Katz; Ronald Sukenick; Raúl Zurita;, Carlos Fuentes, Alicia Cozumel, Carmen Boullosa and Hiber Conteris among others.

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