| Recently, the label "magic realism" has been accused of imposing a Western-cultural epistemology onto texts which present alternatives to a monolithic, Eurocentric world view. Insofar as critics define magic realism as an aesthetic embellishment of classic realism and go on to identify magic realist texts by flagging their "magical elements," they validate this accusation. This dissertation contends that these critics' conceptualizations of magic realism, which posit a foundational Reality as a given, tend to estrange, exoticize, and devalue the non-Western, anti-foundationalist epistemologies inscribed in magic realist texts. Beginning with a survey of the 75 year-old history of the usage of the concept, this paper posits the need for a reconceptualization of magic realism and then addresses that need by analyzing four novels' performative representations of magic realism. Through close readings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Ben Okri's The Famished Road, this dissertation theorizes the formal, philosophical, and political effects of magic realism in practice and asserts that rather than a compensatory supplement to realism, magic realism is a subversive narrative mode which undermines the epistemology of Realism and conjures alternative realities.;The readings presented in this paper performatively demonstrate that postmodern discourse theory provides a language through which we can re-articulate magic realism's duplicitous relationship with realism and theorize the magic realist text's resistance to hegemonic epistemologies. Drawing on various postmodern conceptualizations of the relationship between a reality and its representations (including Jacques Derrida's articulation of "dangerous supplementarity" and Judith Butler's explication of the constitutive force of "matrices of intelligibility"), these readings analyze the rhetorical strategies whereby magic realist novels challenge the metaphysics of presence which underlies realist representationalism. As it construes magic realist texts through a postmodern epistemology of representation, this discussion shows that magic realist novels reiterate realist narrative conventions subversively to infer that all realities are conjured by discursive performances. Thus, it contends that magic realism identifies Reality and History themselves as "magic realisms." Concluding that magic realism opens fissures in realist narrative and appropriates them as roads to alternative matrices of the intelligibility of the real, this dissertation follows the pathways of magic realism into unexplored regions of historical memory where suppressed and forgotten histories are re-membered and reinscribed. |
