Date Thesis Awarded
4-2022
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
English
Advisor
Mary Lynn Weiss
Committee Members
Alexander Prokhorov
Francesca Sawaya
Adam Potkay
Abstract
This paper argues that by limiting magical realism's constitutive tension, or antinomy, between magic and realism to post-colonial "other-speech," contemporary discourses unnecessarily limit the genre's historical scope and literary impact (Ochoa 108). Moreover, they also fail to elucidate the disparate semiotic functions that the genre’s realism and magic serve. Borrowing from Richard Dyer's theory of entertainment and utopia, this paper argues that the genre's realist elements are heavily representational signifiers, "drawing on the audience's concrete experience of the world" to depict social inadequacies (Dyer 27). Conversely, the genre's magical elements are heavily non-representational, not in their authenticity or plausibility, but in their construction of alternative realities within the representational world where things can be better (25,27). Rather than analyzing the genre’s magical elements as singular, this paper argues that magic is a double signifier. Through the proliferation of magic in the phenomenal world, works of magical realism substantiate syncretic theologies, fusing folkloric practices and beliefs with those of organized faith to create new bodies of religious symbolism. This allows magical realism's syncretic theologies to function as cultural problem-solving at two levels, the communal and universal. To examine this latent function of magical realism, this paper analyzes Christian syncretism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1967).
Recommended Citation
Brake, William, "Remystifying the Modern World: Magical Realism and the Reappropriation of the Christian Imaginary in Beloved and The Master and Margarita" (2022). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 1843.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/1843
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