Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913?)

1. Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913?)

2. Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” • From Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary • Accordion, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin. • Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves. • Apologize, v. To lay the foundation for a future offense. • Conservative, n. A statesman enamored of existing evils, as opposed to a Liberal, who wants to replace them with others. • Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.

3. Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” • Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious. • Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane. • Marriage, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two. • Un-American, adj. Wicked, intolerable, heathenish.

4. Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” “The Long Con”—LOST (2.13)

7. Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”

8. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” A Website on Magical Realsm | Wikipedia Entry on Magical Realism

9. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” Rodrigo Garcia, son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and now a television director (Six Feet Under, In Treatment)

10. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” The pursuit of the ‘marvelous’ in art, writes Alejo Carpenter, ’had, of course, been attempted before—by the fantastic, by surrealism . . .—but magical realism’s heuristic followed a different method, looked in a radically new direction: ‘if [earlier art forms] pursued the marvelous, one would have to say that [they] very rarely looked for it in reality’ (1995: 102-104). Magic realism’s anything-but-sanguine-world view is by no means all sweetness and light. As Danow is careful to note, it is, in fact, grounded in ‘a view of life that exudes a sense of energy and vitality in a world that promises not only joy, but a fair share of misery as well’ (Danow 1995: 65ff). In Robert Scholes’ terms a form of ‘metafiction,’ magic realist storytelling, according to Cuddon, is likely to recognize ‘the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic, bizarre and skilful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the elements of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable’ (1998: 488). from David Lavery, ”It's Not Television, It's Magic Realism: The Mundane, the Grotesque, and the Fantastic in 6 Feet Under.” Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For. Ed. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe. London: I. B. Tauris, 2005. 19-33.

11. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” In the worlds created by magical realists, “the supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence” (Zamora and Faris, Introduction: 3). In magic realism, Bruce Holland Rogers insists, “If there is a ghost . . . , the ghost is not a fantasy element but a manifestation of the reality of people who believe in and have ‘real’ experiences of ghosts. Magical realist fiction depicts the real world of people whose reality is different from ours. It's not a thought experiment. It's not speculation. Magical realism endeavors to show us the world through other eyes.” The fantastic offers us a world, as we have just seen, where “we are uncertain whether we are witness to the natural or the supernatural.” Magic realism is not agnostic. The supernatural exists; it is real, at least for a given subject. from David Lavery, ”It's Not Television, It's Magic Realism: The Mundane, the Grotesque, and the Fantastic in 6 Feet Under.” Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For. Ed. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe. London: I. B. Tauris, 2005. 19-33.

12. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” Frida Kahlo, Magical Realist Painter—A Few Small Nips

13. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” Frida Kahlo, Magical Realist Painter—The Two Fridas

14. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” Frida Kahlo, Magical Realist Painter--Roots

15. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings Marc Chagall

16. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings Paul Klee

17. Charlotte Perkins Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”

18. Charlotte Perkins Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” S Weir Mitchell, who proscribed Charlotte Gillman’s rest cure.