From Haruki Murakami's Underground

"Haven't you offered up some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on a 'narrative' in return? Haven't we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not that System at some stage demanded of us some kind of 'insanity'? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else's visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares?"

This idea has been on my mind for sometime, although my interest isn't that the dream turns into a nightmare, but that the content of the dream and the nightmare is exactly the same. Or perhaps it is that the fantasy and the nightmare are exactly the same. But I'm also intrigued that in Murakami this shows up in such close proximity to insanity, or to a madness built upon the excesses of any system or narrative.

How to Write Your Essay

1. Begin by describing the novelty of your essay, and how it disrupts the conventional view of a text, history, identity, etc.

2. Draw out the essential core of the text, or history, or culture.

3. Do this by first introducing disparate phenomena and demonstrating how what appear to be disparate are actually part of the same pattern. Or...

4. Introduce a pattern and demonstrate that what appears to be homogenous is in fact marked by rupture.

5. Anything you treat seriously, treat as a tool to be used. Do not contextualize it.

6. Contextualize anything you do not treat seriously. Philosophers you disagree with are artifacts of naivete.

7. Make sweeping generalizations about how history led, necessarily, to the pattern or disruption that you've described.

8. Dismiss disciplines you know nothing about.

9. Use penetrating metaphors to maximize your audience's pleasure.

10. Finish like you begin, with your own novelty. You are the hero, and you're saving everyone else.

That's what I learned in college.