Rediscovering the Americas: Magical realism in our hemisphere

Rediscovering the Americas: Magical Realism in Our Hemisphere explores magical realism as a common denominator in the literature of the Americas. Drawing from a variety of contemporary literature from our hemisphere---including One Hundred Years of Solitude, Beloved, and Like Water for Chocolate, as well as lesser-known works of magical realism like Green Grass, Running Water---it challenges the notion that magical realism should be defined merely in terms of geography or Latin American history. Rediscovering the Americas draws on an all-encompassing vision of magical realism in order to illustrate that the literary traditions of our hemisphere, in large part because of their shared geographic, literary, and historical marginalization, comprise a common literature.;Chapter 1 provides a necessary preface to the entire dissertation. It explores the mode of magical realism, including its origins, misuses, and critical pitfalls, and then uses Amaryll Chanady's carefully articulated criteria to redefine the term "magical realism" itself. The second chapter expands on Latin America's literary history in general, as well as on magical realism's evolution as a geographically determined narrative mode. This chapter also discusses how Latin America's literary tradition, and particularly the historical phenomenon known as "the boom," created an international readership for Latin American magical realism. Chapter 2 ends by briefly considering the foremost of the "boom" writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the discussion of his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude continues in chapter 3. Specifically, chapter 3 is concerned with alchemy and argues that Garcia Marquez emphasizes the ancient science as the driving force behind the magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Next, in chapters 4 and 5, Rediscovering the Americas covers the mode's appropriation by North American authors and critics, and the distinctiveness of North American magical realism is first justified and then traced through a variety of works. Representative authors include Louise Erdrich, Ron Arias, Robert Kroetsch, and Toni Morrison, and Chapter 4 uses these authors' texts to argue that the distinctly North American version of the mode pays particular attention to both the consumer and the popular cultures. Chapter 5 revisits Morrison in a critical discussion of Beloved's title character as the physical embodiment of magical realism. It insists that we cannot dismiss Beloved as a ghost, and that Morrison uses magical realism to make multiple pasts come alive for her characters and readers. Finally, chapter 6 posits the relationship of magical realism to a variety of marginalized characters and authors of both North and Latin America. Chapter 6 argues that magical realism is a mode best suited to the writers and themes of marginalization, and it heeds Lois Parkinson Zamora's call for increased inter-American scholarship by reconsidering the extent to which both continents embrace magical realism so effectively.