Magical Realism(s)

Novels that juxtapose the marvelous with the everyday have shadowed (and mocked) mainstream realism for the better part of two centuries, and have proliferated in recent years to the point where they may constitute the predominant genre of our globalized culture. Why should such strange mélanges of the quotidian and the supernatural strike so many authors as the perfect vehicle to express 20th and 21st century anxieties and possibilities? We will explore examples of these boundary-defying fictions across several decades and various national literatures. Authors to be studied will include Woolf, Kafka, Calvino, Morrison, Pynchon, Rushdie, and Garcia-Marquez.