Deliberate Alienation: Surrealism and Magical Realism 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...
... middle of paper ...
...e Old Man and the Wormhole." Available 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.)
García Màrquez, Gabriel, trans. Gregory Rabassa. One Hundred Years of Solitude. (New York: Harper & Row, 1998.)
Magritte, René. Painting: Le Prêtre Marié (The Married Priest). 1961. Available online: http://www.magritte.com/3_detail.cfm?ID=253 , May 9, 2000.
O'Brien, 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. Black Orpheus. (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1948.)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, trans. Lloyd Alexander. The Wall. (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1975.)
Swanson, Philip. "The Critical Reception of Garciá Márquez." The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel Garciá Márquez. New York: Cambridge UP, 2010. 25-40. Print.
Christopher, J. (2011, July). The Life and Influence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Yahoo Voices - voices.yahoo.com. Retrieved 2014, from http://voices.yahoo.com/the-life-influence-gabriel-garcia-marquez-8776677.html
Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. “The Norton Introduction to Literature.” New York: W.W Norton &, 2014. Print.
...om, Harold, and John Gerlach. Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. New York, NC: Infobase Publishing, 1999. Web. .
Morley, Brian. "The Illustrations of Leonardo Da Vinci." Burlington Magazine 121.918 (979): 553-562. Web. 26 May 2010.
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.
García, Márquez Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera: a Novel. Edith Grossman. New York: Vintage. 2003. Print.
Bergen, T. (2011). James Kouzes and Barry Posner’s ‘The Truth about Leadership’. Retrieved February 22, 2012 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/leadership-books/post/james-kouzes-and-barry-posners-the-truth-about-leadership/2011/03/07/gIQApWJmjL_blog.html
The poetical works of Federico García Lorca, C. Maurer (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991)
Klinkowitz, Jerome and Patricia B Wallace. The Norton Anthology of Americal Literature. Seventh. Vol. Volume D. New York City: Norton, 2007, 2003, 1998, 1994, 1989, 1985, 1979. 5 vols.
Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. María Elena de Valdés and Mario J. Valdés. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1990. 21-32.
“In 1946, John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert developed the fastest computer at that time, the ENIAC I. It was built under the assistance of the US army, and it was used on military researches. The ENIAC I contained 17468 vacuum tubes, along with 70000 resistors, 10000 capacitors, 1500 relays, 6000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints. It covered 1800 square feet of floor space, weighed 3 tons, consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power.”(Bellis, Inventors of Modern Computer)
Herman Hollerith (1860 - 1929) founded IBM ( as the Tabulating Machine Company ) in 1896. The company renames known as IBM in 1924. In 1906 Lee D. Forest in America developed the electronic tube (an electronic value). Before this it would have been impossible to make digital electronic computers. In 1919 W. H. Eccles and F. W. Jordan published the first flip-flop circuit design.
Technology continued to prosper in the computer world into the nineteenth century. A major figure during this time is Charles Babbage, designed the idea of the Difference Engine in the year 1820. It was a calculating machine designed to tabulate the results of mathematical functions (Evans, 38). Babbage, however, never completed this invention because he came up with a newer creation in which he named the Analytical Engine. This computer was expected to solve “any mathematical problem” (Triumph, 2). It relied on the punch card input. The machine was never actually finished by Babbage, and today Herman Hollerith has been credited with the fabrication of the punch card tabulating machine.
The fist computer, known as the abacus, was made of wood and parallel wires on which beads were strung. Arithmetic operations were performed when the beads were moved along the wire according to “programming” rules that had to be memorized by the user (Soma, 14). The second earliest computer, invented by Blaise Pascal in 1694, was a “digital calculating machine.” Pascal designed this first known digital computer to help his father, who was a tax collector. Pascal’s computer could only add numbers, and they had to be entered by turning dials (Soma, 32). It required a manual process like its ancestor, the abacus. Automation was introduced in the early 1800’s by a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage. He created an automatic calculation machine that was steam powered and stored up to 1000 50-digit numbers. Unlike its two earliest ancestors, Babbage’s invention was able to perform various operations. It relied on cards with holes punched in them, which are called “punch cards.” These cards carried out the programming and storing operations for the machine. Unluckily, Babbage’s creation flopped due to the lack of mechanical precision and the lack of demand for the product (Soma, 46). The machine could not operate efficiently because technology was t adequate to make the machine operate efficiently Computer interest dwindled for many years, and it wasn’t until the mid-1800’s that people became interested in them once again.