Theorizing Irony and Trauma in Magical Realism: Junot Díaz’s <i>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao</i> and Alexis Wright’s <i>The Swan Book</i>

Authors

  • Maria Kaaren Takolander Deakin University, Victoria, Australia.

Keywords:

Magical Realism, Postcolonialism, Trauma, Junot Díaz, Alexis Wright

Abstract

Magical realism has been commonly theorized in terms of a postcolonial strategy of cultural renewal, according to which magical realist fiction is understood as embodying a racialized epistemology allegedly inclusive of magic. The inherent exoticism of this idea has seen magical realist literature rejected as misguided. Critics have recently returned their attention to magical realist fiction, theorizing it in terms of the field of trauma studies. However, trauma readings of magical realism tend to unselfconsciously reinvigorate an authenticating rhetoric: magical realism is represented not as the organic expression of a pre-colonial or hybrid consciousness, but of colonial or other kinds of trauma. Through case studies of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, this paper will intervene in trauma-studies readings of magical realist literature to emphasize the fundamentally ironic nature of the iconic narrative strategy of representing the ostentatiously fantastical alongside the historical. It will also argue that these texts, while invested in representing the traumas of colonialism, are less interested in authenticating magic as part of a postcolonial or traumatic epistemology than in transforming fantasy into history and empowered futurity.

 


Author Biography

Maria Kaaren Takolander, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia.

Maria Takolander is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. She is the author of Catching Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground (Peter Lang, 2007); The Double and Other Stories (Text 2013); and three books of poetry, the latest being The End of the World (Giramondo, 2014).

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Published

2016-08-10

Issue

Section

Magical Realism Cluster