Jesús Benito, Ana Ma Manzanas, and Begoña Simal: Uncertain Mirrors: Magical Realisms in US Ethnic Literatures.
Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: In their united assault on the concept and practice of realism in the 1970s and after, postmodern writers and poststructuralist critics made fabulation and/or metafiction the narrative tools which, via the deconstruction of their own narrative order, might subvert the institutional order of literature as well as of society since both could be metaphorically collapsed into a single system of repression: the order of mimesis.To that attack we owe a number of great postmodern novels (like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow or Robert Coover's The Public Burning) but also critical studies that link, for instance, Henry James's realism of visual perception with contemporary social structures of surveillance.It is therefore tempting to see the more recent rise of postcolonial theory and the concomitant flowering of ethnic (or postcolonial) novels of "magical realism" as a variant of the earlier anti-realist attack: "realism," in this case, referring to the global economic, military, and symbolic power of an imperial "West" and its dominant mode of literary expression.
DOI: 10.4000/ejas.8852
Author: Heinz Ickstadt
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W23950778