Apprehending butterflies and flying beauties : bringing magical realism to ground

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Magical realism and experiences of extremity

Examining magical realist texts including Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1991), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2006), this paper discusses how magical realism examines the extremities of trauma and fear, proposing that magical realist narratives afford a unique ability to represent trauma in a way that is not open to the stylistics of literary realism. Blending the real or believable with the fantastically outrageous, magical realist narratives typically destabilise and disorder privileged centres of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, demonstrating the constructedness of knowledge and history. Accordingly, magical realist strategies are frequently used in interventionist or counter narratives that refuse to adhere to privileged versions of truth or history and insist upon a multiplicity of experience. The majority of magical realist scholarship explores how the genre undermines hegemonic perspectives of history to clear a space for marginal representations of the past. However, as this paper argues, magical realist narratives also provide a unique space for writing about experiences of extremity. Examining the role of fantasy in representations of violence and trauma, this paper proposes that rupturing a realist narrative with the magical or un-real accommodates representations of extremity by conveying the ‘felt’ experience of trauma.

Incredibly close encounters : magical realism and the intimate elegies of Jonathan Safran Foer’s everything is illuminated and extremely loud and incredibly close

This paper will investigate the relationship between prose elegy and magical realism in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It will propose that absence is generative, and that the state of melancholia—or unsuccessful, unresolved grief—is conducive to creativity.

Magical realism and irony's 'edge': rereading magical realism and Kim Scott's Benang

Magical realism has been the subject of much earnest theorising, implicating the narrative mode in postcolonial projects of cultural regeneration not only in Latin America but around the world. The claim that its hybrid vision simultaneously transgresses and supplements Western ratiocinative epistemologies has seen the mode become over-determined and dismissed as a postcolonial cliche. Rarely noted, however, is the ironic nature of the literary mode. Yet the trademark representation of the magical in a realist narrative is marked by a conspicuous incongruity, which is not only necessary to magical realism's aesthetic effect but which also provides a strong incentive for ironic readings. This paper will reread magical realism through Kim Scott's Benang in order to recognise the ironic incongruity at play in magical realism and to revitalise the mode's 'edge'.

Nasdijj's fake magical realist memoir: re-visioning magical realism's relationship with fakery

Examining what might be described as Nasdijj’s "fake magical realist memoir" The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, this paper is interested in how Nasdijj's text might be useful in contesting our understanding of the postcolonial literature of magical realism. Drawing attention to Nasdijj’s utilization of the “primitivist” conventions of magical realism, this paper will illustrate how fakery might be seen as essential not only to Nasdijj's text but also to magical realism. In fact, this paper argues that magical realist novels might be productively read as hoaxes, mobilizing what Graham Huggan describes as the "postcolonial exotic" in order to engage in a subversive act of “culture jamming”. The objective of the analysis is not to condemn magical realism along with Nasdijj’s opportunistic memoir, but rather to rescue magical realism from ideas about authenticity, celebrating its ironies and its challenges to colonial discourses of identity and history.

The Usual Suspects: Jewish Magical Realism, Trauma and the Holocaust

Jewish magical realism is often associated immediately with the historical trauma of the Holocaust. This article sets out to point to some of the problems and limitations such an interpretive approach may bring. After a reconsideration of the allegedly inherent subversive qualities of the mode and a discussion of its frequent association with trauma narratives, especially in the case of Jewish texts engaging with the Holocaust, the discussion will focus on two examples, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002). The aim throughout is to caution against rashly reproducing familiar interpretive maneuvers, which may be in need of reassessment in face of recent fictions like the ones under discussion in this article.

The magical realism of metaphor: cross-cultural comparisons in use of metaphor in cognition

Three experiments explore the hypothesis that due to linguistic and cultural factors, metaphor usage – or thinking in terms of what something is like – differs across cultures. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task supported the hypothesis that perception of what something is like tends to be faster and more automatic in Latino participants than in Anglo participants. In Experiment 2, Anglo participants were less able to solve a problem framed metaphorically than Latino participants were. To ensure that a preference for metaphor is not applicable to all bilingual populations, we included bilingual Asian participants in Experiment 3. In this study, Latino participants rated arguments presented with metaphors as more persuasive than arguments that did not have metaphors, while the opposite pattern was found in Anglo and Asian participants. The findings from these three studies provide support for the hypothesis that the Latino preference for metaphor is real and pervasive. Implications in the domains of education and public health interventions are briefly noted.

The shadow maker: a novel, and Exegesis exploring magical realism, trauma and elegy

 Through a creative artefact and critical exegesis, this thesis explores the interconnections between trauma literature, magical realism, and elegy. Drawing on various theoretical fields including postcolonialism and feminist theory, the thesis contributes an original intervention into the field of magical realist scholarship, arguing for the continuing significance of the magical realist mode as a politically engaged and subversive literature.

Theorising irony and trauma in magical realism: Junot Díaz’s the brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright’s the swan book

Magical realism has been commonly theorized in terms of a postcolonial strategy of cultural renewal, according to which such fiction is understood as embodying a racialized epistemology allegedly inclusive of magic. The inherent exoticism of this idea has drawn criticism. Critics have recently begun to re-envision magical realism in terms of trauma theory. However, trauma readings of magical realism tend to unselfconsciously reinvigorate an authenticating rhetoric: magical realism is represented not as the organic expression of a precolonial or hybrid consciousness, but of colonial or other kinds of trauma. Through case studies of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, this essay intervenes in trauma studies readings of magical realist literature to emphasize the fundamentally ironic nature of the iconic narrative strategy of representing the ostentatiously fantastical as real. It also argues that these texts, while invested in representing the traumas of colonialism, are less interested in authenticating magic as part of a postcolonial or traumatic epistemology than in transforming fantasy into history and empowered futurity.