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.

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 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.

Creative Portion abstract (75%): Literary Fiction Manuscript Souvenirs of the Revolution Against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, betrayal, sexual deviance, rigid morality and a fatal subservience to moral correctness drives the Montelejos clan: complex and self-serving, innocent and deluded, larger than life, an illustrious family line in its final decline. Mariabella Montelejos, who tries to sell her only daughter for the price of a new carriage during the bloodiest part of the Revolution. Her daughter, Portensia Montelejos, who leaves her mother’s body to moulder in the front room after soldiers come at the point of a gun. Gloria Vasquez, celebrated beauty, practising witch, and tormentor of her step-sister, Teresa: ill, gullible, naive, awoken to her destiny by the surreal birth of her daughter. Paulina, a child who once communed with the holy, made an empty vessel by the abuse of her father – and revered as a living saint as she lies dying in a Pueblano convent. The men of the family, weak and susceptible to the mandates of their dying class, are no match for the machinations of such women. Evil abuser Ebner Collins, paralyzed by a jealous man’s bullet in the middle of the Sinai desert. Hernando Vasquez, cowed into marriage by the longing for his dead wife, Evelyn Cuthbert. Guiermo Fuentes de Solis, cuckolded husband. Jaime Vasquez, who hears voices and lives at the bottom of a bottle, unable to save his cousin Paulina. The Revolution is the beginning of the end for Montelejos, and the miraculous will be its undoing. Analytical Portion abstract (25%): An Outsized Reality: How “Magical Realism” Hijacked Modern Latin American Literature With the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien Anos de Soledad in 1967, Latin American writing captured the world’s attention. Critics, readers, and imitators rushed to discuss and emulate this astounding novel. A whole genre of literature, “magical realism”, was popularized, and with it, critical discussion of its influences, history, genre limitations, and the sheer “imagination” it brought to the forefront of literary debate. In this thesis I will discuss the problems associated with “Western” critical analysis of Latin American writing, specifically as it seeks to define, without a proper context, the literature which draws life from the history and culture of Latin America and categorizes its literature without the cultural understanding required.

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With The Fabulist, I hope to provide many of the pleasures of popular narrative�"addictive plot, compelling characters, immersive setting�"while also conducting an earnest interrogation of the value of fantasy in all its forms, as well as the moral vacuity of the lonely fiefdom the protagonist constructs for himself out of pop cultural detritus and his various nostalgic and artistic whims. The book straddles two major settings and timelines: the suburban creep of Pooter Valentine�[BULLET]s hometown, a world where strip malls and big box stores and fast food chains are being augmented in quiet magical realist fashion by something more sinister; and an ambiguously virtual game-world of Pooter�[BULLET]s design, an RPG and DND-indebted land of endless quests and haunting vistas which may not have an exit. While the novel is grounded in the subjectivity of Pooter�[BULLET]s anhedonia and egotism, it also aims to puncture his interiority by also becoming a story about his parents and the real people who begin to intrude (to Pooter�[BULLET]s surprise and chagrin) upon the video-game world he is allegedly the master of. Ultimately, it intends to tell a story both of the everyday ways in which we escape (and in so doing, undermine) our reality, and of a grandly supernatural departure; of escapism as an act of abandonment, but also (at its best) a catalyst for new communities and connections. This novel draft aspires to all these goals, and may perhaps achieve some of them one day. / MFA

Motivated by the lack of scholarship surrounding female characters in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, I sought to examine the distinct identities of four female characters. The collapse of dualities and embodiment of hybridity in Ursula, Pilar Ternera, Amaranta, and the Remedios women reveals the hegemonic power structures that are disrupted by these empowered women. The exploration of these women and their relationships to gendered dichotomies points to the potential of their identities in enacting colonial resistance and reclaiming traditional cultural heritage.