Various contemporary female authors deploy supernatural motifs portrayed through or alongside diverse forms of intermediality in texts which thematise the patriarchal oppression of women. In order to throw light on this phenomenon, this thesis investigates the intermedial relations and supernatural motifs of Carmen Maria Machado’s novella “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU”, and their relation to the political themes of the text. The analysis is based on the method of intermediality, primarily on Lars Elleström’s and Irina O. Rajewsky’s categorisations of intermedial relations. The supernatural motifs are situated within the hybrid context of the gothic and magical realism, and understood as an expression of strangeness. The analysis of this thesis finds that media transformation in combination with supernatural motifs serve to visualise oppressive and violent structures that are typically obscured. What is more, the similarities and tensions between intermediality and supernatural strangeness emphasise the dread and confusion produced in the encounter with uncanny or eerie societal forces. Finally, the tension and the resistance that arise where supernatural strangeness and intermediality meet illustrate a fundamental dilemma of communication: that it is always mediated, and thus, always incomplete.

The dissertation component of this Master’s degree explores the animist ethic in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness; more specifically it will examine how an animist cosmology underlies many of the ethical values in the text in particular those that guide an alternative to the globalising forces of capitalism through a co-operative, eco-friendly solution. By paying attention to the features in the text that could be called animist, in other words the interaction with non-human persons including plants, animals, geological features and ancestral spirits, this dissertation argues that these features are central to the transformation of the protagonist. Camagu’s journey involves a search for belonging that leads him into a network of relationships in Qolorha-By-Sea, which he can only navigate once he enters into his role as a mediator and becomes an exponent of certain ancestral beliefs. I shall argue that this role necessitates an openness and an acceptance of the ambiguity and uncertainty of certain human and non-human relationships. This ambiguity necessarily produces an attitude of openness and awareness in the novel’s central characters that informs the novel’s ecological ethic and expands our notions of inequality to include the more-than-human. Primarily, this dissertation argues that Mda imagines a way of bringing a cultural, animist, world view into the present as a conception of inequality that extends beyond the human. In accompaniment to this dissertation is my own Speculative Fiction novel, Why The River Runs, which is also concerned with what accepting an animist worldview means for my protagonists. The novel explores the mental health struggles of the main protagonist and relates them to the alienating and harmful experience of living under capitalism while also following the second protagonist’s journey through an ancestral calling to become a traditional healer, and follows both protagonists as they navigate a post-apocalyptic scenario. My novel shares several features with Mda’s including ecological issues such as connection with the land and relationships with non-human subjects. Just as Mda does, my novel weaves together this ecological ethic with traditional belief systems and discrepant attitudes towards them. Through the protagonists’ journeys they learn the importance of engaging meaningfully with others as a way of emerging from crippling isolation and inwardness while recognising identity as a process with no certain resolution. / Dissertation (MA (Creative Writing))--University of Pretoria, 2021. / Unit for Creative Writing / MA (Creative Writing) / Unrestricted

Primrose and Other Stories is a short story collection that explores themes of family, loss, and legacy.

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The genre of Magical Realism is normally explored on the sole basis of its identification with and fantastic expression of Latin-American cultural identity. However, the genre, when employed by non-American immigrant women, takes on new characteristics. It not only highlights the mystical underpinnings of everyday life but instructs in a subliminally didactic manner by opening the reader to new possibilities through delightful imagery and a plot woven around transposed myth and folklore. In examining how two female Magical Realists translate their narratives of immigrant life in twentieth-century United States, the instructive nature of the genre is laid bare. Both use a coupling between the genre of Magical Realism and Culinary Fiction to entice the reader into following the lives of each novel’s protagonist, lives communicative of how cultural oppression can persecute immigrant women in a foreign land unless a certain level of assimilation is attained.

Despite the devastating scope of the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918, curiously few references to the flu exist in literature. Katherine Anne Porter offered one of modernism's only extensive fictional treatments of the pandemic in her short novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” decades after her own near-death encounter with the flu. Porter was able to give voice to an experience that had traumatized others into silence by drawing on an early form of magical realism. Magical realism's ghosts—everyday presences rather than otherworldly beings to be feared—are of particular relevance to “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” since ghosts “haunt” Porter's semi-autobiographical Miranda throughout the story, acting as correctives to Miranda's (and Porter's) desire to isolate herself from the familial and regional heritage that burdens her with unwanted and often conflicting ideologies. Ultimately, in using magical realism to explore her sense of self and to articulate the alienating effects of her near-death experience, Porter is able to embrace her complicated heritage and her fractured past, reclaiming interconnectedness while maintaining her individuality.

My thesis, Escape Artist, is a composite novel written as a fictitious memoir, similar in style to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, that describes my experiences between the years 2001 and 2011. During that time I went through Marine Corps Boot Camp, became a military police officer, patrolled Yuma, AZ, was sent to Iraq for a sevenmonth tour as a security detail just before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and made it back home four years later. The novel also looks into my struggles with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms, how they affected the people around me, and what I've been trying to do to remedy them (or ignore them)

The Jubilant City Almanac is a collection of short stories set in the magical Jubilant City, a city founded by a group of Black women in 1736. These stories bridge the whimsical and magical with the realities of poverty, classicism, addiction, abuse and health disparities. “Got His Alligator” follows the journey of two codependent addicts as they try to get their fashion designs onto Jubilant City’s premiere drama, Girl, Please. The characters in “Carbon Copy” use a magical phone to bring Denzel Washington to the city. “Jeremiah the Conqueror” summons Black American folk legend, High John. THrough an exploration of magical realism and speculative fiction, The Jubilant City Almanac tells the stories of Black families and Black complexity.

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A Floating World is a collection of short stories inspired by fairy tales. Often set in worlds where the mundane and the fantastic come together, these stories explore moments of strangeness that slip beyond the bounds of realist fiction. Fantastical events intrude into mundane reality as characters attempt to reconcile the known with the unknowable.