Deliberate Alienation: Surrealism and Magical Realism Critical thinking

Deliberate Alienation Surrealism and Magical Realism fine thinking is a terrible thing. At least, that seems to be a common opinion. We live in an age where people be willing to forecast to anyone but themselves for advice on what they should think. Rather than figure out what their own opinions are, they depose the thinly-veiled slant of the television newscasters, the politics-masquerading-as-reporting of magazines like Time and Newsweek. There are forge shows and magazines that tell you what you think is stylish. Children in grade instill and high school are actually discouraged from thinking differently from their peers or from their teachers. as yet television commercials or assigned readings in school that encourage authoritative 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 any way theyre still not doing their own thinking. Lest we become a coating of zombies, it seems important somehow to stop this disturbing trend. But how to combat this diverseness of unemotionality? Any appeal to the brain-dead must require them to use that very(prenominal) organ which they are allowing to atrophy. Perhaps some shock therapy is in order. Theres 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 glide by the necessary cognitive effort to correct or reconcile the discrepancy, or risk existing in an utterly absurd, impossible, and nonsensical world. Purposely motivator cognitive dissonance may be the best... ...e Old Man and the Wormhole. unattached online http//justice.loyola.edu/mcoffey/ce/wormhole.html , May 9, 2000. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting For Godot. (New York Grove Press, 1956.) Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. (New York Grove Press, 1962.) Garca Mrquez, Gabriel, trans. Gregory Rabassa. One Hundred Years of Solitude. (New York Harper & Row, 1998.) Magritte, Ren. Painting Le Prtre Mari (The Married Priest). 1961. Available online http//www.magritte.com/3_detail.cfm?ID=253 , May 9, 2000. OBrien, Dan. Borges Rides the Cyclone. In Ketchin, Susan, and Neil Giordano, eds. 25 and Under/Fiction. (New York W. W. Norton and Company, 1997.) Sartre, Jean-Paul, trans. S. W. Allen. disastrous Orpheus. (Paris Prsence Africaine, 1948.) Sartre, Jean-Paul, trans. Lloyd Alexander. The Wall. (New York New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1975.)