Uncertain mirrors : magical realisms in US ethnic literatures / / Jesús Benito, Ana Ma Manzanas ; Begoña Simal.

• Superior document: Critical approaches to ethnic American literature ; no. 3
• Author: Benito Sánchez, Jesús.
• TeilnehmendeR: Manzanas Calvo, Ana Ma.; Simal González, Begoña.
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Series: Critical approaches to ethnic American literature ; no. 3.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (276 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

Uncertain Mirrors realigns magical realism within a changing critical landscape, from Aristotelian mimesis to Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics. In between, the volume traverses a vast theoretical arena, from postmodernism and postcolonialism to Lévinasian philosophy and eco-criticism. The volume opens and closes with dialectical instability, as it recasts the mutability of the term “mimesis” as both a “world-reflecting” and a “world-creating” mechanism. Magical realism, the authors contend, offers another stance of the possible; it also situates the reader at a hybrid aesthetic matrix inextricably linked to postcolonial theory, postmodernism, Bakhtinian theory, and quantum physics. As Uncertain Mirrors explores, magical realist texts partake of modernist exhaustion as much as of postmodernist replenishment, yet they stem from a different “location of culture” and “direction of culture;” they offer complex aesthetic artifacts that, in their recreation of alternative geographic and semiotic spaces, dislocate hegemonic texts and ideologies. Their unrealistic excess effects a breach in the totalized unity represented by 19th century realism, and plays the dissonant chord of the particular and the non-identical.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material / Jesús Benito , Ana M Manzanas and Begoña Simal -- Louise Erdrich’s “Father’s Milk”: Magical Realism’s Oxymoronic Nature / Jesús Benito , Ana M Manzanas and Begoña Simal -- Mimesis, Realism, and Counter-realisms / Jesús Benito , Ana M Manzanas and Begoña Simal -- Romance, the Imaginary, and Magical Realism / Jesús Benito , Ana M Manzanas and Begoña Simal -- The Crisis of Representation: Post-realism, Postmodernism, Magical Realism / Jesús Benito , Ana M Manzanas and Begoña Simal -- Juxtaposed Realities: Magical Realism and/as Postcolonial Experience / Jesús Benito , Ana M Manzanas and Begoña Simal -- From Identity to Alter-entity: Trans-selving the Self in Magical Realist Narratives / Jesús Benito , Ana M Manzanas and Begoña Simal -- Of a Magical Nature: The Environmental Unconscious / Jesús Benito , Ana M Manzanas and Begoña Simal -- A Negative Sense of Reality / Jesús Benito , Ana M Manzanas and Begoña Simal -- Bibliography / Jesús Benito , Ana M Manzanas and Begoña Simal -- Index / Jesús Benito , Ana M Manzanas and Begoña Simal -- Authors / Jesús Benito , Ana M Manzanas and Begoña Simal.