1. Expanding Boundaries: Re-thinking Magical Realism Week 1 Introduction: Definitions & History Dr Ben Holgate Leverhulme Early Career Fellow Queen Mary University of London January 2020

2. Housekeeping
Office hours: Tuesdays, 2pm to 3pm, Bancroft Slides: uploaded to QM+ after seminar

3. Assessment
Short essay: 1,500 words, due Sunday, 1 March 2020 (40%) based on weeks 1 to 6 set question Long essay: 2,500 words, due Sunday, 19 April 2020 (60%) based on weeks 1 to 11 topic to be decided by student with module organiser

4. Module Overview
Week 1 Module Introduction: Definitions and History Week 2 Emergence: Latin America: Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World (1949) Week 3 Postcolonial (1): Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981) Week 4 Postcolonial (2): Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981) Week 5 Refugees (1): Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017) Week 6 Refugees (2): Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017) + Essay Workshop Week 7 READING WEEK

5. Module Overview
Week 8 Environment (1): Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider (1987) Week 9 Environment (2): Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider (1987) Week 10 China (1): Mo Yan, The Republic of Wine (1992) Week 11 China (2): Mo Yan, The Republic of Wine (1992) Week 12 Module Review + Essay Workshop

6. Students To Buy or Borrow
Carpentier, Alejo. The Kingdom of This World. Translated by Harriet de Onís. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West. London: Hamish Hamilton, Ihimaera, Witi. The Whale Rider. Harlow, Essex: Heinemann, Mo Yan. The Republic of Wine. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. New York: Arcade Publishing, Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981.

8. Why study? Magical Realism is:
“international commodity” (Zamora/Faris)
“world literary genre” (Mariano Siskind)
“literary language of the postcolonial world” (Bhabha)
portrays different epistemologies/ontologies (West/non-West)
dynamic: authors continuously re-invigorate, re-invent

9. Definition: Zamora / Faris
“The supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence – admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism. Magic is no longer quixotic madness, but normative and normalizing.”
Introduction, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995), 3

10. Definition: Zamora / Faris (2)
“Magical realism is a mode suited to exploring – and transgressing – boundaries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical, or generic. Magical realism often facilitates the fusion, or coexistence, of possible worlds, spaces, systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes of fiction. ... So magical realism may be considered an extension of realism in its concern with the nature of reality and its representation, at the same time that it resists the basic assumptions of post-enlightenment rationalism and literary realism.”
Introduction, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995), 5-6

11. Magical vs Realism
“To what extent is magical realism opposed to realism or a form of it?”
“A common argument for magical realism is that it subverts or expands the protocols of a more traditional novelistic realism, itself associated in turn with philosophical assumptions underwriting the political possession – and the scientific understanding – of the world. There is an important measure of truth in this.”
Michael Bell, “Magical Realism Revisited” (2008), 127,

12. Definition: Warnes
“A basic definition of magical realism, then, sees it as a mode of narration that naturalises or normalises the supernatural; that is to say, a mode in which real and fantastic, natural and supernatural, are coherently represented in a state of equivalence. On the level of the text neither has a greater claim to truth or referentiality.”
Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel (2009), 3

13. Mode vs Genre
“Genre primarily relates to form and, at least on the level of sub-genre, content, while mode refers to manner of narration.”
Anne Hegerfeldt, Lies that Tell the Truth: Magic Realism Seen Through Contemporary Fiction from Britain (2005), 47

14. Subverting binarism
“Another difficulty with critical models that are implicitly based on binarism between the real and the supernatural in magic realism is that most of these novels insert an infinite number of gradations between the two poles: hyperbolic exaggerations, events that are not impossible but are unlikely, improbably coincidences, and repetitions.”
Tamás Bényei, “Rereading ‘Magic Realism’” (1997), 154

15. Subverting binarism (2)
“Magic realist texts do not conceive of the rational and the magical world views as polar opposites, but then neither do they imply a dialectical transcendence of the two opposing views in a totalising synthesis. What they suggest instead is an adjunctive, supplementary relationship between ‘magic’ and ‘realism’.”
Tamás Bényei, “Rereading ‘Magic Realism’” (1997), 157

16. (Partial) History: see Guenther
1925 Franz Roh (art critic): coined magic realism: “magic” = a “mystery” that “does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it.” Massimo Bontempelli (art+lit): realism magico = “the sense of magic discovered in the everyday life of man and things” 1948 Arturo Uslar Pietri applies magical realism to Venezuelan short stories = “the consideration of man as a mystery surrounded by realistic facts” 1949 Alejo Carpentier: lo real maravilloso (‘marvelous real’) = a “presence” and “vitality” in Haiti, “the heritage of all America” – The Kingdom of This World 1955 Angel Flores: applied magical realism to nascent Latin American literary ‘boom’ = “amalgamation of realism and fantasy” that includes the “transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal”

17. Bell on Carpentier
“The phrase lo real maravilloso, therefore, refers to a reality whereas ‘magical realism’ refers to a literary mode. And ‘marvel’ similarly refers to the natural, just as ‘magic’ implies some departure from it. These expressions are, therefore, quite distinct in their meanings and claims; but Carpentier’s argument, which was squarely based on a regional specificity, has coloured the use of the English phrase so that an ethnographic exceptionalism became part of the meaning of the sub-genre.”
Michael Bell, “Magical Realism Revisited” (2008), 127

18. Scholarship
“During the nineties, scholarship on magic realism is generally marked by a more passive adoption of these earlier, uncontested approaches. Typical of much of this scholarship are serious flaws and omissions, such as … the inaccurate extraction and citation of parts of theories at the expense of the total picture, and a disinterest in critically questioning previous assumptions, statements, and models of magical realism, which betrays a surprising lack of interest in the general theoretical issues. … Today, the formulation of a new, more rigorous, and up to date theory of magic realism has become a pressing necessity in the world of literary scholarship.” Marisa Bortolussi, “Why We Need Another Study of Magic Realism” (2003), 281

19. Week 2
Required Reading Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World