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The Grammar of Alienation
A guide to alienate oneself through books
There are countless ways in which one can induce an alienated state, or position. One can travel, enter into psychoanalytic treatment, study critical theory, and so on. Alienation can also come from a specific form and function of literature and of reading.
There are two basic structures to a story: form and content. Form refers to the mode of storytelling. It could include forms such as the oral tradition, film, literary realism, or surrealist visuals. Form is a vocabulary — or, its taking conventional vocabulary and pulling and stretching it in different directions to produce new and interesting effects.
Content is the actual materiality of the story: the plot, the characters, the details, and so on. The content of the form of tragedy, for example, could be Prometheus in Sophocles’ play. How Prometheus is written, described, and speaks, however, is form.
Accordingly, one can induce alienation in literature in two ways, one of which we shall explore in this essay. The first, and most obvious way, is through fantasy. Herbert’s ‘Dune’ series, Eddings’ ‘Belgariad’ series, and even playing DnD could produce such effects. This produces an alienated state — a subjective position of distance from the Other — because the Other is radically unknown to us; we have no way of direct relation…
