Magical Realism: A Gateway out of America and into the World

Abstract

Asalesman turns into an insect and is shunned. The corpse of an inordinately handsome large man washes into a village. A girl grows wings and takes to the circus trapeze. Though these plots are canonical and beloved across the world, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, and Angela Carter are new to most undergraduate students. But those stories’ strangeness is what piques students’ minds. Because magical realism features the fantastical and unreal, students embrace that which is foreign because they see it as a vehicle of the imagination. Once hooked, they enter a genre spread over the world, a feature that makes it an ideal unifying theme for a global literature course. And because magical realism creates meaning differently for each culture, it enables students to understand how the means of creating and processing narrative reveal differences in ideology that lead to oppression and inequality. This teaching note will explain how to structure such a course so that students can build the analytical skills needed to dissect the assumptions, beliefs, and values of various cultures, a journey that will reveal the rich and diverse ways in which magical realism is used across the globe.