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Of Bananas, a Massacre, and Many Truths
“Anyone interested in graduate school should do
undergraduate research! In the humanities, writing a long paper
gives you a good idea of whether you can work alone on a long-term
project. There’s no way you can procrastinate—the work
builds and builds on itself!”
—Kyle Anixter
2006 recipient, Chancellor’s Award
for
Undergraduate Research
Kyle Anixter is up-front about why he decided to do a
senior honors thesis in English: “It looks good for graduate
school, and I wanted to find out if I could write a paper that
long!”
The San Diego native outdid himself on both counts. His paper
will look much better than good when he sends out his application
packages. As for writing enough to fill the required 40 pages,
Kyle’s paper went in at 75.
But despite his initially mundane motives, the project evolved
into an ambitious literary, historical, and anthropological study.
Kyle used the perspectives of literature, history, and anthropology
to explore the actual events surrounding Colombia’s 1928 “banana
massacre” that is central to Gabriel Garcia Márquez’ Nobel Prize–winning
novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Kyle’s paper* about
his original research and conclusions earned him the Chancellor’s
Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, conferred at
his 2006 Commencement ceremony along with his bachelor’s
degrees in English and anthropology.
Topic-shopping at home and abroad
Kyle’s research project is an example
of what can happen by pursuing what is personally interesting—even
if that takes a while to figure out. In Kyle’s case, although
he was determined to do independent research for an honors thesis,
his sophomore year passed without his figuring out a topic. Then, through
the Education Abroad program, he spent his junior year at Cambridge
University, enjoyed a course called Magical
Realism, and discovered Márquez’ book, which uses
that approach—and which Kyle reread seven times. But he
still couldn’t think of a thesis topic.
Kyle’s senior year arrived. He took an upper-division seminar,
Post-World War II U.S. Fiction, with Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, professor of English and director of the Center for Chicano Studies. “I really liked his teaching style,” Kyle says. "And then I learned that the shooting of the striking factory workers described in One Hundred Years of Solitude had actually
happened.”
Eureka moment
“Suddenly I wondered if I could compare the historical version to the way it was represented in literature. I decided to study the massacre anthropologically—not to simply stay inside the text but to use the literature to learn about the culture. I wanted to do a people’s approach,” he says. "I had found my topic."
Among the many ideas Kyle examines in his paper is how nostalgia is revealed in history and
literature. For example, he explores the effects in Colombia of the United Fruit Company (UFC), a U.S. corporation that kept an economic stranglehold on the region but caused
psychological as well as physical devastation when it
left. Kyle shows that the UFC cultivated in the people
a yearning for the modernized world it had promised but
never delivered, creating a strong sense of corporate nostalgia.
“In addition to contributing an interesting
and provocative reading of the Nobel Prize–winning novel,” says
Professor Gutiérrez-Jones,“this
research lends an important case study to scholars exploring
the interplay of globalization, market systems, and nostalgia.”
“My research made me realize that many academic fields can be
combined, and that trying to sort things into single subjects
is a poor strategy when one is trying to pursuing the truth—if that even exists,” Kyle says.
In the process, Kyle also found his future. “I want to
be in a graduate program that allows me to work with as many
departments and people as possible,” he says. “I
want to become a professor.”
* "Abandoned Bananas and Corporate Misrecollection: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Translated Fictions and Histories of Gabriel Garcia Márquez.”
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