This comparative-literature seminar proposes tracing the evolution of magical realism in the 21st century, formally, medially, and geographically. Besides the fundamental elements of magical realism scholarship covering literature and film, the scope of the presentations will extend to geocultural locations such as Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, and to theoretical approaches including literary trauma theory, postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and virtual reality theory. The theoretical foundation of the seminar will rest on Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “vital illusion” – the recognition of “the poetic singularity of events and the radical uncertainty of events” – coined at the beginning of the third millennium, and arguably responsible for not only the survival but also the diversification of the 20th-century writing mode over the past twenty-five years.

Presentations will locate the storytelling mode within the growingly complex field of critical trauma theory, ecocriticism, and virtual reality theory (the simulation hypothesis). Magical realism brings order to the incoherence and randomness of memories originating in limit-events such as historical traumata and ecological disasters (natural or manmade). In what Baudrillard dubbed the “era of simulation,” the image transcends its old functionality as a representation of reality to the status of model: it is now models that generate a “real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” Fictional simulation, and particularly magical realist storytelling, does not yield a copy of reality but a simulacrum, an augmented reality, whose sense and coherence exist exclusively on the level of the magical realist text, independently of non-textual reality. In a recent development, as an A.I.-generated narrative, a story without a human consciousness behind it, magical realism may arguably confirm Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument (2003), which assumes that consciousness is not uniquely tied to biological brains, but can arise from any system that implements the right computational structures and processes.

Panelists are invited to address the actual and the virtual in magical realist narratives, and to focus on metatextual elements, on stories within stories, on the recurring motifs of artistic creation and imagination, and on the “double bind” inherent in the writing mode. We welcome any argument pointing to the versatility and self-perpetuating originality of magical realism in fiction, film, and A.I. simulation in the 21st century. 

            Please submit your presentation abstract on the ACLA website, and e-mail a short bio with institutional affiliation and scholarly background to Eugene Arva at [email protected] and [email protected].