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Monoculture represents a hindrance to literary ecocriticism. While the ecocritical project aims to think globally, doing so within the linguistic confines of a single language restricts access to very helpful (but non-Anglo) textual material. I argue that of this material, Gabriel García Márquez’s novels are particularly useful because of his unique execution of magical realism towards environmental ends. This project uses ecocritical scholarship to revisit Márquez’s works and to examine the ways in which his deployments of environmental magical realism synthesize and build upon ecocritical elements from earlier trends in Latin American literature while suggesting new venues of evolution for the hermeneutics of ecocritical trends. Through a close theoretical reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and the Autumn of the Patriarch, novels which represent useful case studies for his polemical use of magical realism, I conclude that Márquez explores and suggests ways the field of ecocriticism can parse representations of an adversarial relationship between humans and nature.

The didactic material advances according to the progress of the available media and evolve bringing new visions and foundations to pedagogy. This dissertation is about creating and estimating new didactic options, based on mathematical games, figures and magical squares and introducing them to the mathematics class where they will meet more classical options such as handwriting or more modern options like computers. The first part deals with the theoretical introduction of the concepts to study. We will introduce the magical figures and especially the magic squares to give an overview of their mathematical properties which are useful to generate the material we will present. In the particular case of the magical squares, we will give an historical introduction and present briefly their relation with some other sectors related to the human being, such as arts, psychology or the hobbies and we will add some useful methods to create these magical squares. We will introduce the didactic usefulness of the magical figures in their connexion with some topics of the mathematics secondary programme. We will analyse the different nowadays most used didactic options in the mathematics class and determine which of them will be used as a basis for the material we will create, the exercises that will be done on paper sheets, the use of computers and of the digital boards. The second part of the dissertation deals with the use of the magical figures in the actual education in Czech Republic as education options, the same way textbooks or digital devices are used with educational purpose. Moreover, we will have a look at already existing material on the education web of another country: Spain. We will present the didactic material we generated on paper sheets and digitally and we will check its usefulness in the educational system both in Czech Republic and in Spain and see if it creates motivation on the students.

This novel operates on two levels. First, it is a story concerning the fate of a young woman named Raven Adams, who is prompted into journeying westward after witnessing what she believes to be an omen. On another level, however, the novel is intended to be a philosophical questioning of western modes of “science-based” singular conceptualizations of reality, which argue that there is only one “real world” and anyone who deviates from this is “crazy,” “stupid,” or “wrong.” Raven as a character sees the world in terms of what might be called “magical thinking” in modern psychology; her closest relationship is with a living embodiment of a story, the ancient philosopher Diogenes, which she believes is capable of possessing others and directing her journey. As the story continues the reader comes to understand Raven’s perceptions of her reality, leading to a conceptualization of reality as being “multi-layered.” Eventually these layers are collapsed and unified in the final chapters. The novel makes use of many reference points including philosophy, classical mythology, folklore, religion, and internet social media in order to guide the reader along Raven’s story.

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Lawrence Ngoveni, Student no 0204864A, MA thesis, Literature & Language Studies, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences. 2006. ngovenil@yahoo.com. / This research report examines Mia Couto’s novel Under the Frangipani as an intervention into the problematic of memory in post-war Mozambique. It attempts to locate Couto’s narratives among contemporary writing in Africa. It argues that Couto’s narratives combine allegory and magic realism in their endeavor to highlight the complexity of the Mozambican past and the need to include a diversity of voices from different sources. It focuses primarily on the novel’s inclusive narrative approach which manifests through the coexistence of putative worlds. In doing so, I explore the tension between the ontological assumptions of officialdom and those of the weak.

Hideous Progeny: Postcolonial Fiction and the Gothic Tradition explores the vexed relationship between postcolonial fiction and the Anglo-European-American Gothic mode. Gothic motifs figure abundantly in postcolonial works, but they are not always meant to be taken seriously; often they take a comic and ironic stance toward the subject matter. When horror does appear in these works, it is usually not situated in the abject Other (the pharmakos figure), but in the projecting mindset of the dominant culture. As the title Hideous Progeny implies, such postcolonial novels are the rebellious offspring of the Gothic canon; they can even be dubbed Frankenstein's monsters, created from the disjecta membra of the nineteenth-century Gothic tradition and reassembled into a newly vital, global Gothic literature. Or, to use a different metaphor, they function as inverted mirror images, as photographic negatives, of the nineteenth-century Gothic novel, neutralizing its familiar tropes with an injection of "magical realist" motifs from diverse cultural traditions. This study uses a psychoanalytic methodology to analyze the Gothic source echoes in selected novels by Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie. Through the lens of post-Freudian theorists Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok, and Julia Kristeva, in particular, these novels will be depicted as Gothic--suspended between a haunted past and a technologically disorienting present--and also anti-Gothic. If the Gothic novel explored the unconscious anxieties of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western culture, as many have suggested, the postcolonial Gothic novel explores the unconscious anxieties of an emerging global culture in the late twentieth century. Unlike its Anglo-American precursor, however, postcolonial Gothic fiction does not recoil from the unknown, but embraces the "liminal" zone, finding in it both "tiger and lady," both terror and potential renewal.

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THE REAL THING is a collection of short stories released from the confinement of the everyday. The stories allow characters to pop off the page from every angle. With an eye for anthropomorphism and ear for lyric, the collection is comprised of twenty-nine short stories, nineteen of which work in a flash fiction form. Magical in its motions, and charming in its spirit, The Real Thing explores life’s losses and gains through the lens of the strange and at times the absurd. It invites its readers to cast away expectation, sit back, and watch the show.

The five short fiction stories in this collection vary in styles from Realism, Fairy Tale, to Magical Realism, and all relate in some degrees, to the world of food. "The Food Ghost," told between two parallel perspectives, is the story of a young girl whose apartment is haunted by the ghost of a woman cooking through her last days on earth. "Fig," is a fairytale about a little girl who won't eat, and how her slightly over-bearing parents deal with her refusal. "Drive," tells what happens when a woman tries to hitchhike away from a sour relationship. "How Not To Cook An Emu Egg," tells the story of a small town woman who brings an emu egg with her to a big city. "A Certain Kind Of Hunger," follows a young woman with a disease that causes her to transform into a pink monster when she becomes hungry. After each story is a recipe relevant to the narrative, told from one character's perspective in each piece.