"The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World"

Paper Summary:

This paper discuses how Gabriel Garcia Marquez's story, "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World", illustrates neatly, how the process of acquiring knowledge through the logical structures of critical thinking is limited by a variety of perceptual blocks that effectively pre-filter new information into already functional categories of knowing. In particular, the paper looks at how, by placing a primary emphasis on visual perception, this story articulates the logical processes that take the children in the story from initial perception (seeing the bulge) through to full knowledge.

From the Paper:

"It is important to understand, as Michel Foucault points out, that the mediating process of logic - the linking through induction or deduction of newly perceived with the already known - is not a gesture that can stand alone as an elementary unit, but must be seen as a function that is linked horizontally to that which has come before (the already perceived) and that which has yet to come into perception as the not-yet seen and, by extension, the not-yet known. (Foucault, 1972, p.107-8). Put another way, even with the finely-tuned process of deductive logic in place, an individual's range of knowledge (what he or she can know) is in many ways limited by what has already been perceived. In this sense, logic works, like metaphor to a literary theorist or linguist, to locate a new perception in terms of the structures of the already known and the already perceived. "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin.
• Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M.S. Smith. London:Routledge.
• Lynch, G., and Rampton, D., eds. (2005). Short Fiction: An Introductory Anthology.Toronto: Thomson-Nelson.

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