The Sad Kitchen, a work of magical realism, tells the story of a saintly woman named Helen. She opens an underground kitchen where people who feel guilty can come to be comforted and nurtured in the middle of the night. The story is, at its heart, a reflection on forgiveness. Song of Neon, also of the magical realist genre, is an existential work about a nurse named Avery and her husband, an owl house maker, named Saul. Their town, Milliard, is under a trance. Avery and Saul struggle with their respective identities in the quiet, vacuum the town has become.

A House with People in It is a collection of stories working through concepts of identity, family, relationships, and how those things renew and replace themselves in perpetuity. I think of identity less of a rigid, singular thing and more of a swirling, fluid multitude. If the body is a house, then identity is the people who live inside it. How they live next to each other—who butts up against who, who sleeps in what bed—is what’s interesting to me. These works collected in this thesis are largely the stories that I think hew closest to the things that I am concerned with, in the identities that I occupy.

This thesis is comprised of a collection of short stories, most of which are set in southern, urban milieus. The fictional characters contained within deal in their own unique ways with the crises they face. Most of these sources of conflict arise from domestic complications. Six of the eight stories are written in the first person; the collection is voice-driven and concerned with the idiosyncratic points of views of the focal characters, and in this way borrows from the tradition of Southern fiction, which is in many cases laced with dark humor.

In her novel Tracks, Louise Erdrich tells the story of a band of Anishinaabe early in the twentieth century. Through the two narrators, one a tribal elder and the other a mixedblood who eventually abandons the traditions of the tribe, the novel offers two divergent perspectives of the events that take place as the government divests the tribe of its land. The conflicting perceptions of these occurrences, which are magical realist in nature, underscore the conflict within the tribe to maintain tradition in the face of the ever-increasing influence of European settlers. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the perceptions at odds with one another in order to shed new light on the significance of Erdrich’s use of magical realism in the text. Highlighting Erdrich’s engagement with magical realism, a largely postcolonial literary device, will hopefully expand notions of identity and authenticity within the Native American literary tradition.

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The aim of this dissertation is to trace the function of parody in the context of Salman Rushdie&rsquo / s magical realistic fiction. The magical realism of Rushdie&rsquo / s fiction presents a complex Third World experience which constitutes an alternative to, and challenges the Eurocentrism of western culture. The form and content of Rushdie&rsquo / s novels are so intense and rich that the whole body of his work comes to the fore, not as an outcome of the two clashing civilisations, that is East and West, but rather as an immense medley of the two cultures. While &ldquo / writing back to the empire&rdquo / , Rushdie draws on innumerable sources ranging from such grand narratives as Genesis, Iliad, Ramayana, A Thousand and One Nights, Hindu, Persian, Greek, and Norse mythologies, and local cultural traditions, to modern politics mingling fiction and reality in a broad historical perspective, so that his work becomes a synthesis of East and West, an international aesthetic plane where diversities express themselves freely. The dissertation focuses particularly on Rushdie&rsquo / s Midnight&rsquo / s Children, The Moor&rsquo / s Last Sigh,and Shalimar The Clown. / it contains an introductory chapter, a theory chapter, including two subchapters, a development chapter with three subchapters which analyse the above mentioned three novels, and a conclusion chapter. The introductory chapter presents an overview of the issues to be investigated in the subsequent chapters. The theory chapter deals with the concepts of colonialism, nationalism, and the past and the present of postcolonial literary theory with reference to its leading theorists, such as M. Foucault, E. Said, H. Bhabha, and other recent critics / this chapter also introduces magical realism by reference to a number of current definitions and approaches. The following three subchapters, which focus on the analyses of the three novels, explore how parody functions both thematically and structurally in relation to Rushdie&rsquo / s magical realism. The concluding chapter demonstrates that Rushdie&rsquo / s work creates an unrestrained plane of an international culture where multiple visions and diversities can find a room to assert themselves.

Despite a devoted cult following and high praise from a handful of reviewers, Donald Harington has received scant attention in the academic literature. Harington (1935-2009) published 14 novels, most of them centered around the fictional Ozark hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas. Because he wrote mostly about a single town and because his novels contain a folkloric magical realism, he has often been compared to William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but his works defy easy classification. This report argues that Harington’s novel Farther Along is a recovery narrative structurally and thematically congruent with the recovery narratives told at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The storyteller establishes his “qualifications” as an addictive drinker and depicts alcoholism as a symptom of underlying problems manifested not only in drinking but also in self-pity and resentment. The drinker reaches a crisis, or bottom, and begins to recover after going to meetings and hearing someone else’s autobiographical story that reveals truths about the nature of addiction. Continued attendance at meetings, during which one identifies with the stories of others, ends alcoholic isolation. Help from some type of higher power becomes crucial to achieving sobriety. And recovery includes service to others as a safeguard against the return of self-pity. However, in Farther Along it is not AA’s twelve-step program that leads the protagonist to sobriety. Instead, it is storytelling in itself – fiction – that functions as the “program” of recovery. More particularly, Harington, himself an alcoholic who remained sober for more than two decades, found an alternative to AA in his bizarre brand of magical realism. Thus, the novel is a testament to the healing power of stories. / text

Magistro darbe tyrimas atskleidė, kad magiško(jo) realizmo poetikai romanuose svarbus interdiscipliniškumo aspektas. Biblijos, istorijos, mitologijos faktų pateikimas sumaišo dabartį ir praeitį, tikroviškus ir antgamtinius reiškinius, universalumą ir realybę. Magiško(jo) realizmo poetika atskleidžia netikėtą kultūros ir civilizacijos opoziciją, kur gamta, papročiai, tradicijos priskiriamos būtent kultūros fenomenui, o civilizacija priartinama mokslo ir taisyklių sampratai. Unikali naratyvo forma, laikų, vietų kaita, vardų vartojimas – priartintų stebuklo, neįtikėtinų įvykių galimybę. Visa tai – magiško(jo) realizmo poetikoje skirta skaitytojo įtraukimui į tekstą, jo aktyvinimui ir stebinimui. / The research revealed that the aspect of interdisciplinarity was important for the poetics of magic(al) realism in the novels. Presentation of biblical, historic, mythological facts blended the present and the past, realistic and supernatural phenomena, versatility and reality. The poetics of magic(al) realism revealed an unexpected opposition of culture and civilisation, where nature, manners, traditions were attributed namely to the cultural phenomenon, and the civilization was brought closer to the concept of science and rules. A unique form of narrative, vicissitude of times and locations, usage of names – should anticipate the possibility of a miracle, unbelievable events. In the poetics of magic(al) realism, all that is used for involvement of a reader into the text, his/her activation and causing surprise.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Theatre, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 68).