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.

This collection consists of a critical preface and five short stories. The preface analyzes what it terms 'fringe fiction,' or stories dealing with elements that are improbable or unusual, though not impossible, as it distinguishes this category from magical realism and offers guidelines for writing this kind of fiction. The short stories explore themes of attachment, loss, guilt, and hope. Collection includes the stories "Portrait," "Dress Up," "Change," "Drawn Onward, We Few, Drawn Onward," and "Broker."

Following the formal conclusion of reconciliatory processes in a newly post-apartheid South Africa, narrative remained a perdurable, centripetal force. Extending into the realm of literature, the inquiries of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were altered and enlarged. The mode of magical realism, in particular, emerged as a viable method not only for representing the world, but for working through uncertain futures and traumatic histories. Shimmering with the extraordinary and ineffable strangeness of the magical realist text, Achmat Dangor’s short story “The Devil”, offers expansive, recognizable and revelatory ways of dealing with the trauma of apartheid. Crucially, the narrative represents the private efforts of individual, personal healing in contradistinction with official processes of reconciliation. This thesis examines the ways in which “The Devil” proposes the body as a site of exploring the structuring antipodes of individual-collective and public-private, ultimately untethering these binaries through a process of bodily dis/entwining.

This thesis introduces three emerging Australian playwrights, Lally Katz, Ben Ellis and Kit Lazaroo, who are interrogating the politics of culture, identity and gender through the application of magic realism to theatre. This thesis contends that magic realist theatre offers a public site for the cultural mediation of binaries: self and other, margin and centre, life and death, western and non-western, pragmatic and spiritual. Australia, because of its history, geographical location and cultural positioning provides a fascinating case study.

Orientador: Márcia Valéria Zamboni Gobbi / Banca: Lílian Lopondo / Banca: Sonia Helena de Oliveira Raymundo Piteri / Banca: Maria Lúcia Outeiro Fernandes / Banca: Odil José de Oliveira Filho / Resumo: O presente estudo tem como objetivo principal apresentar os desdobramentos do realismo mágico numa análise de A jangada de pedra (SARAMAGO, 2006) e em leituras de As intermitências da morte (SARAMAGO, 2005) e Ensaio sobre a cegueira (SARAMAGO, 2007), em que o procedimento literário em questão - tendo em conta a figura do narrador - adquire uma função dialógica, que se dá por meio de referências intertextuais com mitos, lendas e outras formas de narrativa da tradição literária ocidental. A análise literária baseia-se nas concepções de Gerárd Genette e outros autores sobre o narrador; para a concepção de realismo mágico, utilizamos essencialmente as reflexões de Irlemar Chiampi e Willian Spindler; no que diz respeito aos diálogos promovidos pela intertextualidade, recorremos aos conceitos propostos por Mikhail Bakhtin, Lauren Jenny e Lucien Dällembach. De posse destes e de outros estudos da teoria da narrativa, analisamos os textos literários, com a preocupação de identificar elementos que inserem os romances mencionados na perspectiva do realismo mágico, procedendo também à reflexão sobre o diálogo que o autor português realiza com a literatura hispano-americana por meio desse procedimento, procurando compreender o processo de construção dos romances pelo viés da narrativa mágica e suas contribuições para a literatura contemporânea / Abstract: This study aims to present the features of magical realism in an analysis of A jangada de pedra (SARAMAGO, 2006) and in readings of As intermitências da morte (SARAMAGO, 2005) and Ensaio sobre a cegueira (SARAMAGO, 2007), in which that narrative procedure - taking into account the narrator - acquires a dialogical function, that comes to the fore through intertextual references about myths, legends and other forms of the Western literary tradition. The literary analysis is based on the ideas of Gerárd Genette and other authors about the narrator; for the concept of magical realism, we use essentially the reflexions of Irlemar Chiampi and William Spindler; as for the dialogues induced by the intertextuality, we make reference to the concepts proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin, Lauren Jenny and Lucien Dällembach. Using those and other studies of narrative theory, we analyze Saramago‟s texts, bearing ever in mind the need to identify elements that insert those novels in the perspective of magical realism, proceeding also to reflect about the dialogue the Portuguese author creates with the Spanish-American literature through this procedure, aiming to understand the process of novel building through the lens of magical narrative and its contributions to contemporaneous literature / Doutor

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.

In this collection of short stories, I abduct experiences from my own life and take them on an imaginative journey. I experiment with elements of structure and point of view, often incorporating the magical or surreal to amplify the narrator’s internal landscape. As demonstrated in the title story, “Almost Astronauts,” these stories all deal with a sudden and sometimes destructive shift in the narrator’s perspective.

The critical preface, "Learning to Break the Rules" discusses workshop rules as guidelines, as well as how and why I learned to break them. The creative portion of this thesis is made up of eight short stories: "The Many Incarnations of Blazer Chief," "Anna's Monsters," "The Pecan Tree's Daughter," "When the Seas Emptied," "The Umbrella Thief," "How to Forget," "Fracture," and "Stealing Dreams."

Magical realism comes from Franz Roh, a german art historian and critic, who first used the term to describe the Post-Expressionism movement in visual art. His seminal writings and definitions on Post-Expressionism, then known as magical realism, were translated into Spanish and made available to Latin America in the mid twentieth century. Authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez adopted Roh's writings and re-appropriated magical realism into literary art, and from there the new genre proliferated through the Latin American Boom and magical realism in literary fiction reached global recognition, inspiring authors across the world to take it up and continue the tradition into the present.

A multi-generational family saga that follows the story of how a one-winged American girl joins family with a four-armed Indian woman.