Example research essay topic: Deliberate Alienation Surrealism And Magical Realism - 1,453 words

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Critical thinking is a terrible thing. At least, that seems to be a popular opinion. We live in an age where people are willing to look to anyone but themselves for advice on what they should think. Rather than figure out what their own opinions are, they trust the thinly-veiled slant of the television newscasters, the politics-masquerading-as-reporting of magazines like Time and Newsweek. There are fashion shows and magazines that tell you what you think is stylish. Children in grade school and high school are actually discouraged from thinking differently from their peers or from their teachers.

Even television commercials or assigned readings in school that encourage positive behavior are only promoting this phenomenon of mental laziness: whether people are told to think good things or told to think bad things is unimportant; either way they " re still not doing their own thinking. Lest we become a culture of zombies, it seems important somehow to stop this disturbing trend. But how to combat this kind of apathy? Any appeal to the brain-dead must require them to use that very organ which they are allowing to atrophy. Perhaps some shock therapy is in order. There's a reason our language contains the phrase "to slap some sense into" someone.

I propose that the best way to cure such mental apathy is to attack it. By presenting the individual with an apparent reality which contradicts or prevents what s / he is familiar or comfortable with, one would force him / her to spend the necessary cognitive effort to correct or reconcile the discrepancy, or risk existing in an utterly absurd, impossible, and nonsensical world. Purposely inducing cognitive dissonance may be the best or only way to elicit any sort of cognitive activity at all. One of the easiest and most effective ways in which to achieve this goal is to deliberately alienate the individual from those things which s / he takes for granted -- to pull the rug out from under him / her , so to speak.

I am not speaking merely of removing objects from the subject's world -- say, stealing a lamp from the night table -- but also of removing or rearranging relationships: moving the lamp to the other night table, placing a shoe on the night table instead of the lamp, etc. Jean-Paul Sartre understood the effectiveness of this kind of alienation when he wrote his short story "The Wall": "Tom was alone too but not in the same way. Sitting cross-legged, he had begun to stare at the bench with a sort of smile, he looked amazed. He put out his hand and touched the wood cautiously as if he were afraid of breaking something, then drew back his hand quickly and shuddered. If I had been Tom I wouldn't have amused myself by touching the bench; this was some more Irish nonsense, but I too found that objects had a funny look: they were more obliterated, less dense than usual. It was enough for me to look at the bench, the lamp, the pile of coal dust, to feel that I was going to die.

Naturally I couldn't think clearly about my own death but I saw it everywhere, on things, in the way things fell back and kept their distance, discreetly, as people who speak quietly at the bedside of a dying man. It was his death which Tom had just touched on the bench. " (Sartre, "The Wall, " 12) Sartre's characters are prisoners of war, they are spending the night in a jail cell together and have been informed that they are going to be executed in the morning. This news has put them in a removed state from all the everyday objects that surround them: "the bench, the lamp, the pile of coal dust, " even their own bodies. In realizing that they are soon to be separated from their realities, environments, and bodies, they come to look at them from an objective perspective. They are alienated from the very things which constitute their selves, and thus they perceive them in an entirely new light. It is precisely this effect which we are trying to achieve in our efforts to force people out of cognitive inactivity.

Symbolism is a common literary and artistic device. It is used to enhance one's appreciation of the message being conveyed, or to express a concept in a poetic and artistic manner. A poet who means to discuss the birth of a child might talk instead about the rising of the sun: both events are a beginning, both inspire awe in those who behold them, and so forth. Many readers will be more appreciative of both events thanks to this comparison, having thought about how the two are similar, and also about how they are different. The genre of magical realism takes this power of symbolism and amplifies it, and it is precisely through alienation of concepts that it accomplishes this. Gabriel Garca Mrquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude is a fine example of how this works.

Examining symbolism is made all the more necessary when the symbol is absurd. In the story, both Jos Arcadio Buenda and his son, Colonel Aureliano Buenda, discover the corpse of a large ship in the area near Macondo, about four days' journey from the sea: "When they woke up, with the sun already high in the sky, they were speechless with fascination. Before them, surrounded by ferns and palm trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an enormous Spanish galleon... The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds... Many years later Colonel Aureliano Buenda crossed the region again, when it was already a regular mail route, and the only part of the ship he found was its burned-out frame in the midst of a field of poppies. Only then, convinced that the story had not been some product of his father's imagination, did he wonder how the galleon had been able to get inland to that spot.

But Jos Arcadio Buenda did not concern himself with that when he found the sea after another four days' journey from the galleon. " (Garca Mrquez 12 - 13) One Hundred Years of Solitude is a fictional story that nevertheless recounts a real history. It relates through metaphor and symbolism the tale of Garca Mrquez' home country of Columbia. Of course, the reader cannot help wondering exactly how that Spanish galleon did get so far inland, after all. And it is that wondering which leads us to the analogy of the Spanish people themselves. Garca Mrquez is trying to suggest that our confusion over the galleon is exactly the confusion of the Columbian natives over the arrival of the Europeans in their land. Where did they come from?

How did they get here? How have they become so well entrenched? Why has no one noticed this before? Through the apparent incredibility of a galleon four days inland, we come to understand the apparent incredibility of the Spanish usurping of Columbian land. Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones uses this technique to impart a philosophical rather than a political message. This is really the more difficult task: though the average couch potato will not need much convincing to see how politics can affect his / her life, philosophy is a discipline widely ridiculed and criticized as being too vague or ethereal, not concerned enough with tangible reality.

But to Borges, his philosophy is the very stuff of everyday life, it is the secret of that tangible reality -- it is the true reality behind the ostensible reality which most take for granted. In the Prologue to Book One of Ficciones, "The Garden of Forking Paths, " he mentions quite seriously that one of the book's eight stories "is not entirely innocent of symbolism. " (Borges 15) When one considers the fantastic events that transpire in the book, it is difficult to imagine that this comment is not meant to be tongue-in-cheek. But in fact, I believe that it truly is not. Ficciones is a tour de force of magical realism.

But Borges chooses to emphasize the term "realism" in his understanding of the genre. To him, reality is already magical enough. He uses sentences like "Late in February, 1939, something happened to him, " (Borges 167) as if to say that the mere fact of a thing happening was exciting and fantastic in itself, and needed no adjectival crutch ("something strange happened to him, "something amazing happened to him"). What Borges finds frustrating is that his audience does not share the same mystical view o...

Research essay sample on Deliberate Alienation Surrealism And Magical Realism