A… as in A-line, A-frame, A-level… and Bertolt Brecht

I was just looking through a book of ‘phrases and fables’ and as usual for some reason I started at the back and fumbled my way to the front page… I do this with magazines, newspapers, all sorts of writings except actual books; with books I start at the beginning and I’m not one of those people who always have a peep at the ending first!

So, I ended up on page 1 with ‘A’; it hadn’t occurred to me how many words and phrases have the discrete letter A at the beginning, but there it was ‘A, a former category of film classification…’, ‘AA a former category of film classification…’, (also of course the Automobile Association, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Archers’ Addicts), ‘A-bomb’, ‘A-effect, alien affect’, ‘A-line, style or cut of a dress’, ‘A side, the most commercially promising side of a pop-music single disc’, ‘A², the virus identified as the cause of Asian flu’, ‘A6 murder, a controversial murder case involving James Hanratty’…

On further investigation I discovered almost hundreds of other ‘A’ words’,

•  A battery
• A+ and A-, human blood type, also A+ (programming language)
• A value (A), a measure of substituent effects on the stereochemistry of cyclohexane
• A*, a pathfinding algorithm
• A^♯, the object-oriented functional programming language
• A, musical note
• A, a British rock band
• A, albums by Agnetha Fältskog, Cass McCombs, Jimmy Raney, Jethro Tull, Denki Groove, and an EP by Ayumi Hamasaki
• A, songs by Barenaked Ladies, Cartel and DJ Amuro
• A, pseudonym of Matthew Arnold, Alexander Pope and Isaac Asimov
• A, titles poems, novels, films, TV series and characters
• A, transport and transport systems
• … and many many more!

I was, however particularity interested in A something I’d never come across before, despite studying English, literature, drama… he A-effect. I am intrigued by this, and may very well use it with my creative writing classes; the term was invented by Bertolt Brecht and it was a technique he used to distance actors and audiences in his plays, using a variety of different devices… this could be the use of tense, spoken stage directions in the production (as a writer you would have to stand back from your text and put in these ‘directions’ for the reader)

I must investigate the A-effect further… Brecht actually had a V-Effekt, a Verfremdungseffekt… meaning an alienation effect… I have always thought that alientaiting a reader or audience was something to be avoided, but maybe it could offer a more objective view of the text/production/action… I must investigate!