Hacettepe University Graduate School of Social Sciences 

Department of American Culture and Literature 

 

 

 

 

A STUDY OF MAGICAL REALISM  

IN STEVEN MILLHAUSER’S, AIMEE BENDER’S,  

KELLY LINK’S, AND KEVIN BROCKMEIER’S  

SHORT STORIES 

 

 

 

Bülent AYYILDIZ 

 

 

 

Ph.D. Dissertation  

 

 

Ankara, 2021 

 



 
 

 
 



 
 

 
 

 

A STUDY OF MAGICAL REALISM  

IN STEVEN MILLHAUSER’S, AIMEE BENDER’S,  

KELLY LINK’S, AND KEVIN BROCKMEIER’S  

SHORT STORIES 

 

 

 

 

Bülent AYYILDIZ 

 

 

 

 

Hacettepe University Graduate School of Social Sciences 

Department of American Culture and Literature 

 

 

 

 

Ph.D. Dissertation 

 

 

 

 

 

Ankara, 2021 



 
 

 
 

 

 

KABUL VE ONAY 

Bülent Ayyıldız tarafından hazırlanan “A STUDY OF MAGICAL REALISM IN STEVEN 

MILLHAUSER’S, AIMEE BENDER’S, KELLY LINK’S, AND KEVIN BROCKMEIER’S SHORT 

STORIES” başlıklı bu çalışma, 18.06.2021 tarihinde yapılan savunma sınavı sonucunda başarılı 

bulunarak jürimiz tarafından doktora tezi olarak kabul edilmiştir. 

 

Prof. Dr. Meldan Tanrısal (Başkan) 

 

 

Doç. Dr. S. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş (Danışman) 

 

 

Doç. Dr. Hülya Yıldız Bağçe (Üye) 

 

 

Dr. Öğr. Üyesi Ceylan Özcan (Üye) 

 

 

Dr. Öğr. Üyesi Selen Aktari Sevgi (Üye) 

 

Bu tez çalışmasında Sayın Doç. Dr. S. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş Danışman olarak görev almıştır.  

 

Yukarıdaki imzaların adı geçen öğretim üyelerine ait olduğunu onaylarım. 

 

Prof. Dr. Uğur Ömürgönül Şen 

Enstitü Müdürü 

 



 
 

 
 

 

YAYIMLAMA VE FİKRİ MÜLKİYET HAKLARI BEYANI 

Enstitü tarafından onaylanan lisansüstü tezimin tamamını veya herhangi bir kısmını, basılı (kağıt) ve 
elektronik formatta arşivleme ve aşağıda verilen koşullarla kullanıma açma iznini Hacettepe 
Üniversitesine verdiğimi bildiririm. Bu izinle Üniversiteye verilen kullanım hakları dışındaki tüm fikri 
mülkiyet haklarım bende kalacak, tezimin tamamının ya da bir bölümünün gelecekteki çalışmalarda 
(makale, kitap, lisans ve patent vb.) kullanım hakları bana ait olacaktır. 

Tezin kendi orijinal çalışmam olduğunu, başkalarının haklarını ihlal etmediğimi ve tezimin tek yetkili 
sahibi olduğumu beyan ve taahhüt ederim. Tezimde yer alan telif hakkı bulunan ve sahiplerinden yazılı 
izin alınarak kullanılması zorunlu metinleri yazılı izin alınarak kullandığımı ve istenildiğinde suretlerini 
Üniversiteye teslim etmeyi taahhüt ederim. 

Yükseköğretim Kurulu tarafından yayınlanan “Lisansüstü Tezlerin Elektronik Ortamda Toplanması, 
Düzenlenmesi ve Erişime Açılmasına İlişkin Yönerge” kapsamında tezim aşağıda belirtilen koşullar 
haricince YÖK Ulusal Tez Merkezi / H.Ü. Kütüphaneleri Açık Erişim Sisteminde erişime açılır. 

o Enstitü / Fakülte yönetim kurulu kararı ile tezimin erişime açılması mezuniyet 
tarihimden itibaren 2 yıl ertelenmiştir. (1) 

o Enstitü / Fakülte yönetim kurulunun gerekçeli kararı ile tezimin erişime açılması 
mezuniyet tarihimden itibaren  ….. ay ertelenmiştir. (2) 

o Tezimle ilgili gizlilik kararı verilmiştir. (3) 

    11/08/2021  

                                                                                                                             [İmza] 

                                                                                                             Bülent Ayyıldız 

 

1“Lisansüstü Tezlerin Elektronik Ortamda Toplanması, Düzenlenmesi ve Erişime Açılmasına İlişkin Yönerge”  

(1) Madde 6. 1. Lisansüstü tezle ilgili patent başvurusu yapılması veya patent alma sürecinin devam etmesi durumunda, tez 
danışmanının önerisi ve enstitü anabilim dalının uygun görüşü üzerine enstitü veya fakülte yönetim kurulu iki yıl süre 
ile tezin erişime açılmasının ertelenmesine karar verebilir.   
 

(2) Madde 6. 2. Yeni teknik, materyal ve metotların kullanıldığı, henüz makaleye dönüşmemiş veya patent gibi yöntemlerle 
korunmamış ve internetten paylaşılması durumunda 3. şahıslara veya kurumlara haksız kazanç imkanı oluşturabilecek 
bilgi ve bulguları içeren tezler hakkında tez danışmanının önerisi ve enstitü anabilim dalının uygun görüşü üzerine 
enstitü veya fakülte yönetim kurulunun gerekçeli kararı ile altı ayı aşmamak üzere tezin erişime açılması 
engellenebilir. 
 
 

(3) Madde 7. 1. Ulusal çıkarları veya güvenliği ilgilendiren, emniyet, istihbarat, savunma ve güvenlik, sağlık vb. konulara 
ilişkin lisansüstü tezlerle ilgili gizlilik kararı, tezin yapıldığı kurum tarafından verilir *. Kurum ve kuruluşlarla yapılan 
işbirliği protokolü çerçevesinde hazırlanan lisansüstü tezlere ilişkin gizlilik kararı ise, ilgili kurum ve kuruluşun önerisi  
ile enstitü veya fakültenin uygun görüşü üzerine üniversite yönetim kurulu tarafından verilir. Gizlilik kararı verilen 
tezler Yükseköğretim Kuruluna bildirilir.  
Madde 7.2. Gizlilik kararı verilen tezler gizlilik süresince enstitü veya fakülte tarafından gizlilik kuralları çerçevesinde 
muhafaza edilir, gizlilik kararının kaldırılması halinde Tez Otomasyon Sistemine yüklenir.  
 

* Tez danışmanının önerisi ve enstitü anabilim dalının uygun görüşü üzerine enstitü veya fakülte yönetim kurulu 
tarafından karar verilir. 



 
 

 
 

 

ETİK BEYAN 

Bu çalışmadaki bütün bilgi ve belgeleri akademik kurallar çerçevesinde elde ettiğimi, 

görsel, işitsel ve yazılı tüm bilgi ve sonuçları bilimsel ahlak kurallarına uygun olarak 

sunduğumu, kullandığım verilerde herhangi bir tahrifat yapmadığımı, yararlandığım 

kaynaklara bilimsel normlara uygun olarak atıfta bulunduğumu, tezimin kaynak 

gösterilen durumlar dışında özgün olduğunu, Doç. Dr. S. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş 

danışmanlığında tarafımdan üretildiğini ve Hacettepe Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler 

Enstitüsü Tez Yazım Yönergesine göre yazıldığını beyan ederim. 

 

Bülent Ayyıldız 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



iv 
 

 
 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bilge 
Mutluay Çetintaş for her immeasurable encouragement, support, and guidance. She has 
expanded my vision by sharing her knowledge and enriched this dissertation with her 
constructive feedback. 

I would like to thank my dissertation committee members Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hülya Yıldız 
Bağçe and Asst. Prof. Dr. Ceylan Özcan, as well as my jury members Prof. Dr. Meldan 
Tanrısal and Asst. Prof. Dr. Selen Aktari Sevgi for their guidance, valuable time, and 
comments on my dissertation. I also owe a special thanks to my colleagues and the 
members of the Department of American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University 
for providing me with the much-needed working conditions in writing this dissertation.  

I would like to express my gratitude to TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological 
Research Council of Turkey) for their financial support with the 2214-A International 
Research Fellowship Program for Doctorate Students. I am indebted to the Department 
of English and the Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg, 
Germany for allowing me to conduct research as a visiting scholar between 2019-2020 
and I would especially like to extend my appreciation to Prof. Dr. Günter Leypoldt, who 
took time to discuss and assist my doctoral project.  

 

.  

 



v 
 

 
 

ABSTRACT 

 

AYYILDIZ, Bülent. A Study of Magical Realism in Steven Millhauser’s, Aimee 
Bender’s, Kelly Link’s, and Kevin Brockmeier’s Short Stories, Ph.D. Dissertation, 
Ankara, 2021. 

 

This dissertation analyzes Steven Millhauser’s, Aimee Bender’s, Kelly Link’s, and Kevin 

Brockmeier’s short stories in the light of magical realism. The short stories use magical realist 

and postmodern elements to create alternative depictions of the characters’ troubles, pains, and 

resistances. Although magical realism, by definition, has been affiliated with non-Western and 

postcolonial literature, various fiction writers utilize the genre because its adaptable narrative 

structure elucidates the invisible, inexplicable, and ambiguous aspects and ordeals of modern-

day life. The above-mentioned writers do not come from colonized or developing geographies 

and their adaptation of magical realism mirror lives in the Western society. Their stories 

incorporate magical, fantastic, science fictional, and postmodern elements to build a 

reconstructive narrative. Although poststructuralist ideas are traceable and signal deadlocks of 

language, identity, reality in these stories, the magical realist mode transforms genre fiction and 

postmodern elements to provide defamiliarized settings in which the relationship between truth 

and representation is reconfigured. These blended magical realist forms exceed the limitations 

of genre fiction and confined writing methods, which have been deployed by academic 

institutions and creative writing programs. The adaptation of magical realist narratives do not 

only transform conventional postmodernist writing methods and genre fictions, which have 

already been worn out, but also reformulate oral traditions of storytelling, fairy tales, and fables. 

Blending magical, science fictional, surrealist, and absurd elements help the writers to 

reconfigure conventional literary labels and explore alternative representations. 

 

 

Key Words  

Magical Realism, Postmodernism, Short Story, Steven Millhauser, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, 

Kevin Brockmeier 



vi 
 

 
 

ÖZET 
 

AYYILDIZ, Bülent. Steven Millhauser, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link ve Kevin 
Brockmeier’ın Öykülerinde Büyülü Gerçekçilik, Doktora Tezi, Ankara, 2021. 

 

Bu tez, büyülü gerçekçilik ışığında, Steven Millhauser, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link ve Kevin 

Brockmeier’ın öykülerini incelemektedir. Bu yazarlar öykülerinde karakterlerin sorunlarını, 

acılarını ve dirençlerini alternatif betimlemelerle belirlerken büyülü gerçekçi ve postmodern 

ögeler kullanmıştır. Büyülü gerçekçilik, tanım gereği, Batılı olmayan ve post-kolonyal 

edebiyatla özdeşleştirilse de, birçok kurmaca yazarı bu türden faydalanmaktadır çünkü 

uyarlamaya elverişli olan anlatı yapısı görünmeyeni, açıklanamayanı, modern hayatın 

zorluklarını ve muğlak yönlerini tanımlayabilmektedir. Söz konusu yazarlar sömürgeleşmiş ya 

da gelişmekte olan coğrafyalardan gelmemektedir ve kullandıkları büyülü gerçekçilik Batılı bir 

toplumunun yaşantısına ayna tutmaktadır. Yazarlar öykülerinde yapıcı bir anlatı kurgulamak 

için büyülü, fantastik, bilimkurgusal ve postmodern ögeleri bir araya getirmekten çekinmezler. 

Öykülerinde yapısökümcü düşüncelerin izleri, dilin, kimliğin ve gerçekliğin çıkmazları 

gözlemlense de büyülü gerçekçi anlatı, tür edebiyatını ve postmodern ögeleri dönüştürerek 

yadırgatılmış (defamiliarized) zaman ve mekanlar oluşturur ve bu alanlarda hakikat ve temsil 

arasındaki ilişki yeniden şekillendirilir. Büyülü gerçekçiliğin bu karma formları tür edebiyatı 

sınırlamalarının, akademik kurumların ve yaratıcı yazım programlarının bildik yazım 

yöntemlerinin ötesine geçer. Büyülü gerçekçi anlatı uyarlamaları uzun süredir kullanılagelen 

yıpranmış postmodern anlatıları ve tür edebiyatını dönüştürmekle kalmaz, aynı zamanda hikaye 

anlatıcılığının sözlü geleneğini, peri masallarını ve fablları da tekrar bir düzenlemeden geçirir. 

Büyülü, bilimkurgusal, gerçeküstücü ve absürt ögelerin harmanlanması yazarların alışılagelmiş 

edebi etiketleri yeniden şekillendirmesine ve alternatif temsiller keşfetmesine yardımcı olur.  

 

Anahtar Sözcükler 

 

Büyülü Gerçekçilik, Postmodernizm, Öykü, Steven Millhauser, Aimee Bender, Kelly 

Link, Kevin Brockmeier,   

 



vii 
 

 
 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 

ACCEPTANCE AND APPROVAL.…………………………………………………..i 

YAYIMLAMA VE FİKRİ MÜLKİYET HAKLARI BEYANI…..…..….…….……ii 

ETİK BEYAN………………………………………………..……...........……………iii 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……...………………………………………...………….iv 

ABSTRACT...…………………………………………………………………………..v 

TURKISH ABSTRACT.………………………………………………………………vi 

TABLE OF CONTENTS..……………………………………………………………vii 

INTRODUCTION...……………………………………………………………………1 

CHAPTER 1: FIVE PRINCIPLES OF MAGICAL REALISM…………………...34 

1.1.  IRREDUCIBLE ELEMENT OF MAGIC……………………………...35 

1.2.  REALISTIC DESCRIPTIONS….………………………………………48 

 1.3. UNSETTLING DOUBTS………....……………………………………...52 

 1.4. TWO SEPARATE REALMS……………………………………………57 

 1.5. TIME, SPACE, AND IDENTITY.........…………………...…………….61 

CHAPTER 2: BEYOND POSTMODERNISM....………………………………..…70 

 2.1. ONTOLOGICAL QUESTIONS………………………………………...71 

2.2. HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION…….…...….………...……….84 

 2.3. SELF-REFLEXIVITY…………………………....……………………...89  

CHAPTER 3: BLENDING BOUNDARIES..…………………………….………..102 

3.1. ALTERNATIVE METHODS OUT OF CONVENTIONAL          
SYLLABUSSES……………………………………………………………...103 

 3.2. REEVALUATION OF THE GENRE……………………...….…..…..109 

  3.2.1. Kelly Link’s Dissolved Science Fiction………………………..110 

 3.2.2. Unidentified Objects and Metafictional Plays in Kevin 
Brockmeier’s Fiction………………………………………………….118 



viii 
 

 
 

 3.2.3. Magic, Myth, Technology, and Modern Life in Steven 
Millhauser’s Stories…………………………………………………...125 

  3.2.4. Aimee Bender’s Reconstruction of Fairy Tales…………….......132 

 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………138 

 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………..153 

 APPENDIX 1: ORIGINALITY REPORT………………………………....167 

 APPENDIX 2: ETHICS BOARD WAIVER FORM……………………....169



 

  

1 

INTRODUCTION 

“Magic is the crown or nightmare of the law of cause and effect, not its contradiction.” 

—Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions 

Magical realism, generally associated with Latin American literature, has been a 

popular narrative device since it merges the real and the magical and consists of 

oxymoronic worldviews that stimulates an interaction between writing modes and 

techniques. Various writers from different literary backgrounds and various geographies 

have adapted magical realism to depict multicultural and ethnic perspectives and resist 

repressive ideologies and authorities. With the popularization of magical realism and 

adaptation in cross-cultural contexts from all over the world, varied forms and functions 

of the mode is observable. As a product of Latin American literature, magical realism 

was used to signify the vernacular voice of oppressed/colonized nations and minorities, 

now, this narrative form is implemented widely in writing to broaden the borders of 

fiction in depicting inexplicable events and the plight of the stranded selves. 

The strict relationship between magical realism and post-colonial/ethnic/minor literature 

has been examined by various academics, but the influence of magical realism on non-

ethnic American literature has been relatively less examined. Christopher Warnes’s 

Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence, Brenda 

Cooper’s Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye, Jean-

Pierre Durix’s Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic 

Realism, Jenni Adams’s Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature: Troping the Traumatic 

Real, Lyn Di Iorio Sandin and Richard Perez’s Moments of Magical Realism in U.S. 

Ethnic Literatures are some of the prominent works that explore magical realism as a 

voice of oppressed nations and minorities. Moreover, studies that draw theoretical 

frames on magical realism such as Magic(al) Realism by Maggie Ann Bowers, A 

Companion to Magical Realism by Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang, Magical 

Realism: Theory, History, Community by Louis Parkinson Zamora, and Wendy B. Faris 

exemplify magical realist traits through ethnic fiction and writers from so-called “Third 

World” countries. Although global perspective of magical realism is mentioned in these 



 

  

2 

studies, the general view reflects an association with post-colonial literature. However, 

this study focuses on the functionality of magical realism in short stories that are not 

primarily concerned with ethnic and post-colonial literature.  

In this dissertation, I will focus on North American short stories written by Steven 

Millhauser (1943- ), Aimee Bender (1969- ), Kelly Link (1969- ), and Kevin 

Brockmeier (1972- ). These writers intermingle fantastic and magical elements to 

exceed narrative limitations and their short stories reflect the characteristics of 

postmodernist and magical realist fiction. Although they use these elements and tools, 

they also diverge from the conventional understanding and objectives associated with 

magical realism and postmodernism. In this study, “magical” refers to elements that are 

extraordinary incidents, beings, and the reader is inured to their extraordinary nature. By 

mingling various elements such as myths and fairy tales, and borrowing from different 

genres, such as gothic and fantastic literature, these writers form eclectic narratives to 

reinterpret the function of unreal elements. 

Currently, all four writers are active producers of fictional works. Their writing careers 

have started at the end of the 1990s, except for Millhauser, who has been writing for 

five decades. His first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American 

Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright was published in 1972 and his first short story 

collection, In the Penny Arcade was published in 1986. His other short story collections 

are The Barnum Museum (1990), The Knife Thrower (1998), Dangerous Laughter: 

Thirteen Stories (2008), We Others: New and Selected Stories (2011), and Voices in the 

Night (2015). Although Millhauser was enrolled in the graduate program of the English 

Department at Brown University, he did not finish his dissertation; instead he decided to 

complete his first novel (Lambert 30). Nevertheless, he pursued an academic career; in 

1976, he started as a teaching assistant at Brown, and later became a faculty member of 

the English Department in Skidmore College for twenty-nine years until his retirement 

in 2017 (Ingersoll and Wagner-Martin 3). His novel, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an 

American Dreamer (1996), was awarded with the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, and We Others 

granted him The Story Prize in 2012. Millhauser has developed different writing styles 

and techniques over the years. His fictional works have been placed among the works of 

Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and Italo Calvino and “his melding 



 

  

3 

of realism and fantasy has also been called ‘Magic Realism’” (Ingersoll and Wagner-

Martin 5). 

Aimee Bender’s first story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, published in 

1998, blends fairy tales with surreal and magical elements. Bender is a graduate of 

Master of Fine Arts from the creative writing program at University of California at 

Irvine and gives lectures and workshops on creative writing at the University of 

Southern California (Beglin 58). Her other short story collections Willful Creatures 

(2005) and The Color Master (2015) also display surreal and fantastic characteristics. 

Since she uses “anti-mimetic and unnatural characters” (79), Brian Richardson 

categorizes her writing as “unnatural narratives” which is defined as narratives that 

“employ anti-mimetic events, characters, frames, and/or narration—techniques that not 

merely elude but clearly violate the norms of realistic representation” (75). 

Kelly Link’s first book, 4 Stories, was published in 2000. Link received her MFA at the 

University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She also taught creative writing at several 

Universities and workshops. Her stories received several prizes including Nebula and 

Hugo Awards. Get in Trouble was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2016 (“Kelly Link 

Biography”). Like Bender’s fiction, she blends fantasy, myth, and fairy tales in her short 

story collections; Stranger Things Happen (2001), Magic for Beginners (2005), and 

Pretty Monsters (2008). As the elements of horror turn into humor and absurdity, 

conventional functions of fantasy and magic are erased off through her narrative. 

Kevin Brockmeier imbeds magical and fantastic elements into the routines of American 

life in his fiction. While some critics label his works as “magical,” his stories are 

classified in different categories. Emily Capettini, for instance, identifies him as a new 

fabulist (3). After receiving his MFA degree from the University of Iowa Writers’ 

Workshop in 1997, his short stories started to appear in various publications and his 

writing style has transgressed genre boundaries (Kokes). In his short story collections, 

Things That Fall from the Sky (2002), The View from the Seventh Layer (2008), and The 

Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories (2021), he maintains his style of blending fairy 

tales and fantastic elements.  



 

  

4 

All four writers exploit the fragility of realism; fantastic and supernatural elements are 

fluidic in their writing style. In their fiction, “magical realism performs a wide and 

profound cultural and ideological work. It yanks us out of the comfortable complacency 

that assesses the real as an either-or kind of argument, placing us in an alternative 

intellectual landscape” (Benito, Manzanas, and Simal 3). While these writers 

reconfigure the borders, binary oppositions, conception of reality, and establish unusual 

story structures to reinscribe the conventional narratives of genres such as horror and 

fantasy, their depiction of magical realism, similar to its use in postcolonial and ethnic 

literatures, revolves around the marginalized selves. Yet, these writers differ from 

postcolonial and ethnic writers in terms of presenting the individual, culture, and 

identity because their stories are not necessarily based on collective narratives or do not 

represent a collective or ethnic identity, although various cultural elements from 

different geographies are incorporated. The fantastic realms and magical narratives are 

created through individualized myths and imagination. On the other hand, 

characteristics of post-structuralism and postmodern fiction are also visible in these 

writers’ short stories; meta-narrative, self-reflection, fabulation, fragmentation, and 

intertextuality are among commonly used elements. While these writers reflect ironic, 

absurd, transient, destabilized, and pessimistic aspects of characters, magical traits of 

the narratives affix a reversal effect. These short stories indicate a reconstructive 

process by going beyond the realistic representation rather than focusing on the 

dismantled meaning. The fictional characters deal with traumas and try to explore 

questions on identity and values, which often results in coming to terms with their 

handicaps and imperfections through a renegotiating process. This dissertation aims to 

explore how magical realism is transformed in American short fiction after the 

popularity of postmodernist fiction, starting in the 1990s. Although the examined short 

stories include an amalgamation of genre fictions and use the tools of postmodernism 

and magical realism, they also move beyond the confinements of pre-established 

narrative apparatuses in constituting a unique style of writing. 

An overview of the definitions and progression of magical realism is necessary before 

delving into the connections between postmodernism and magical realism and how the 

above-mentioned writers formulate their writing styles. German art critic, Franz Roh 

used the term “magical realism” first in 1925, to refer to dimensions of post-



 

  

5 

expressionism. According to Roh, expressionism embraces an exaggerated way of 

depiction, whereas the new painting distinguishes itself through the portrayal of 

ordinary objects. As he puts it, “Post-Expressionism offers us the miracle of existence 

in its imperturbable duration” (22). Rather than focusing on a fantastic emerging out of 

an external world, his objective is to paint everyday life objects, which are examined in 

“a new kind of action” (23). Realistic depiction, for him, is not copying but establishing 

reality in a new format (24). However, Roh’s definition of magical realism in painting 

does not exactly correspond to how the term is used in literature, because magical 

realism refers to a blend of fantastic and real elements. The term does not solely contain 

new depictions of real images, but also introduces unreal objects as if they are real. 

Meanwhile, definitions of magical realism within a literary context also vary from critic 

to critic. Besides Roh, Alejo Carpentier, Angel Flores, and Luis Leal also offer 

definitions that overlap but also contradict each other. 

Carpentier formulates his own term and names it “lo real maravilloso Americano” 

(1949), which places magical realism as something peculiar to Latin America’s 

geography, inheritance and culture. For him, similar to Roh, the fantastic does not 

emerge from an unknown world; it already exists in Latin culture. He states, “I found 

the marvelous real at every turn . . . The marvelous real is found at every stage in the 

lives of men who inscribed dates in the history of the continent” (87). He believes that 

the material needed for magical realism is embodied in the rituals and traditions of Latin 

America. 

Angel Flores traces magical realism in Franz Kafka’s works since he intermingles the 

fantastic and real elements as an amalgamation. For him, 1935 was the turning point in 

Latin American literature and Jorge Luis Borges’ collection A Universal History of 

Iniquity (1935), published in the same year, is an example of this new phase of Latin 

American literature (113). Inspired by Kafka, Borges creates stories that treat fantastic 

elements as a part of reality. Although he does not come up with a distinctive definition 

of magical realism, the appliers of the mode “cling to reality as if to prevent ‘literature’ 

from getting in their way, as if to prevent their myth from flying off, as in fairy tales, to 

supernatural realms. The narrative proceeds in well-prepared, increasingly intense steps, 



 

  

6 

which ultimately may lead to one great ambiguity or confusion” (116). Borges’s stories, 

which are influenced by the detective genre, also encompass suspense and turmoil. 

However, Luis Leal disagrees with Flores and blames him for referring to authors who 

do not use magical realism. Similar to Carpentier, Leal associates magical realism with 

Latin American literature and explains the distinctive features of magical realism. For 

instance, he maintains that dream motifs are not included in this mode. Since the causes 

behind the events do not matter, the psychological analysis of the characters can be 

ignored. Also, for him, magical realism does not have aesthetic concerns (121). He says, 

“Magical realism is, more than anything else, an attitude toward reality that can be 

expressed in popular or cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles, in closed or open 

structures” (121). For him, the writer’s main concern is not to create fantastic or 

imaginary elements, but to resist reality through displaying the mystery within the 

nature of society and environment. 

The definitions that connect magical realism to Latin America, and the popularity of the 

mode among Latin American writers, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, 

and Laura Sepulveda, seems to verify “Latinness” as a characteristic of magical realism. 

Mythic elements and atavistic tales, which are commonly used in this mode, are also 

believed to represent colonized nations. As Stephen M. Hart suggests, “what for the 

inhabitant of the ‘First World’ is magical (a woman who ascends to heaven, ghosts who 

return to earth, priests who can levitate, gypsies who can morph into a puddle of tar) is 

real and unremarkable for the inhabitant of the ‘Third World’” (3). Combining local 

myths and legends with reality seemed corresponding to postcolonial literature, 

therefore, the mode takes its roots from a geographical or cultural stance, rather than a 

philosophical outlook. 

Homi Bhabha considers magical realism as “the literary language of emergent the 

postcolonial World” (7) and the increasing popularity of magical realism among 

“postcolonial” writers such as Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, and Amitrav Ghosh might 

add to the assumption that magical realism is a postcolonial form. Although it bloomed 

in Latin America and in “postcolonial” nations, non-Latin writers such as Angela 

Carter, Toni Morrison, and Haruki Murakami have also used magical realism in their 

works. As Hart claims, “In the 1980s magical realism became a genre formula, 



 

  

7 

transferable to scenarios that lacked the particular historical characteristics . . . was even 

adopted as a model by non-Latin American writers” (12). With the widespread 

popularity of magical realism, its various definitions are inclined to be more 

contradictory. 

Fredric Jameson states that “The concept of magical realism raises many problems, both 

theoretical and historical” (“On Magic Realism in Film” 307), and it is hard to narrow 

down the definition to a specific common ground for the critics and writers. 

Furthermore, the wide terminology used for the fantasy genre and fantastic elements 

broadens the borders of a specific definition. The only explanation about the “fantastic,” 

which will be detailed in the chapters, comes from Tzvetan Todorov. Categorization of 

the fantastic as “the uncanny” and “the marvelous” does not strictly cover the entire 

“unreal” elements of literature. For instance, Flores displays Kafka’s Metamorphoses 

(1915) as a magical realist work, whereas Leal disagrees with her. In Metamorphoses, 

Gregor Samsa is terrified of transforming into an insect, but his parents do not find the 

metamorphoses unusual. Todorov says, “With Kafka, we are thus confronted with a 

generalized fantastic which swallows up the entire world of the book and the reader 

along with it” (174). The distinctions of magical realism and fantasy, as well as the 

genre’s relationship with postcolonial literature are still debatable issues. 

Critics like Anne C. Hegerfeldt and Wendy B. Faris claim that magical realism has 

flowed into mainstream and gained an international recognition. Others like Amaryll 

Chanady, explored the matter further and contribute to a more “universal” definition of 

magical realism. Hegerfeldt writes, “to disconnect magic realism from postcolonial 

literatures is not to say that the mode is not essentially a postcolonial one. In 

challenging the rational-empirical world-view’s claim to hegemony and revaluing 

alternative modes of thought, magic realism pursues decidedly postcolonial aims” 

(303). Claiming a regional magical realism would be against the essence of magical 

realism, because it means to create a distinction between Western and non-Western 

views. For Hegerfeldt, magical realism is not peculiar to the “other,” but it exists in the 

cities and at the “very heart of the West itself” (303). Amaryll Chanady and Wendy B. 

Faris are able to frame distinctive features of the mode. For instance, Faris, rather than a 

regional or postcolonial definition, presents characteristics of magical realism. In her 



 

  

8 

essay, “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction,” she views 

magical realism as a kind of “replenishment” in postmodernism (163). In the essay, she 

discusses less “magical” works, which are not part of Latin American literature, but 

influenced by frontier writers such as Marquez. For example, Patrick Suskind’s Perfume 

(1985) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) include magical realist elements and these 

non-Latin writers prove that “geographical stylistics are problematic” (163). 

Faris lists five characteristics of magical realism, which will be further examined in the 

first chapter. The first one is that the text consists of “‘irreducible elements of magic” 

(“Scheherazade’s Children” 167), which is neither rational nor explainable within the 

realm of science. In these texts magical elements are treated as real and they have 

always been considered real in the narrative. They remain as magical, “which 

repeatedly call attention to themselves as metaphors” (“Scheherazade’s Children” 168). 

Therefore, the magical does not thoroughly render into “reality.” However, these 

elements are not precisely magical either and unlike fantastic literature, magical realism 

is not a way of escaping reality (Leal 122). 

Faris’s second point is related to the descriptions used in the text, which reflect a 

detailed mimetic world. Although the described world is familiar, the magical touch 

brings unusual aspects to the conventional description of our environment. The 

references to historical events and real places create a reality effect with a magical aura. 

For instance, a real object in the narrative becomes a magical device as seen in 

Midnight’s Children (1981), where a basket is used as a vehicle to travel from 

Bangladesh to Bombay (170). The function of everyday objects is rearranged and is 

converted to include magical qualities. 

The third characteristic is similar to Todorov’s categorization of the fantastic; there is a 

hesitation when the reader encounters the magical event since the cause is unknown. 

The reader doubts whether the event is supernatural or related to the character’s 

psychological distortion. For Faris, this is debatable since the cultural background of the 

reader might affect the amount of uncertainty. Thus, the primary concern of 

understanding is between a hallucination and a miracle (“Scheherazade’s Children” 

171). Faris gives an example from Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In the novel, the characters 

speculate whether the character Beloved is the reincarnation or ghost of the deceased 



 

  

9 

daughter or whether the characters are experiencing a bad dream (“Scheherazade’s 

Children” 171). From a cultural perspective, what is considered an irrational happening 

in a Western society might be a possible occurrence in a non-Western culture. 

Another characteristic of magical realism is its ability to bring together two separate 

worlds, such as the world of the living and the dead. In the narratives, two worlds 

collide and the boundaries between them are either erased or transparent. Faris says, 

magical realism is “the intersection of two worlds, at an imaginary point inside a 

double-sided mirror that reflect in both directions” (“Scheherazade’s Children” 172), 

and as a result, the border between reality and fiction is also punctured. Both the text 

and truth turn into questionable notions, an element which is shared by postmodernism 

and magical realism. 

Lastly, texts using magical realism are able to explore concepts related to time, space, 

and identity. Time does not only reflect a relative notion, but also an untraceable 

dimension. The reader’s understanding of time and space is constantly undermined. 

Space is reframed through unusual habitats and constantly changing environments. The 

problem of identity is revealed when the characters give up being the person that they 

are supposed to be since their faces, voices or life span are repeatedly reversed and 

manipulated. 

Magical realism has affinities with other literary tools such as defamiliarization and 

fabulation. Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky defines defamiliarization as an artistic 

technique and says, “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are 

perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 

‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty and length of perception 

because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” 

(11). Similarly, magical realists portray an unfamiliar reality to the reader. Rather than 

portraying the “magical” as an element to evoke emotions, the mundane, everyday tools 

become estranged and magical elements sustain a semblance of reality in magical 

realism.  

Correspondingly, fabulation, a technique that relates fiction to fairy tales does not lean 

on conventional reality and the narration is structured in such a way that the text reflects 



 

  

10 

its textuality. Magical realists, especially Borges, follow a similar pattern. As Robert 

Scholes claims, “opposition between language and reality, the unbridgeable gap 

between them, is fundamental to the Borgesian vision, and to much of modern 

epistemology and poetic theory” (9). Along with fabulation, metafiction is adapted in 

these magical realist narratives. Metafiction highlights the fictionality of the text 

through reflecting the narrating process. In Patricia Waugh’s words, “Metafiction is a 

term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws 

attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship 

between fiction and reality” (2). In Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1944) 

there is a non-linear and multilayered magical novel within the story. The novel does 

not have a fixed plot, but multiple variations at the same instant. The title of Borges’s 

story is also the title of the novel written by Ts’ui Pen in the story. While the narrator 

refers to this novel, in which the narrative is constantly “forked,” the story itself is 

forked and both narrations turn into a maze. The metafictional strategy includes magical 

elements in which Borges presents a self-reflexive text that reveals the inadequacy of 

language. 

Whether magical realism started with postmodernism, or whether there is a hierarchy 

between the two narrative forms are ambiguous. To trace the intricate relationship 

between magical realism and postmodernism, both will be examined further. Magical 

realism is usually considered as a branch of postmodernism, or magical realism is 

accepted as postmodernism with magic. However, definitions and their concurrent 

directions and regional approaches are problematic. While postmodernism is considered 

as a more universal literary form, and often as the predecessor of magic realism, the 

definitions and borders are blurred. For instance, although magical realism has been 

labeled as the literature of colonized territories, this narrative mode has thrived in a 

much larger geography. During the twentieth century, writers from different parts of the 

world, such as Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, Italo Calvino, and Haruki Murakami, 

have produced fictional works embedding magical realist elements, which proves that 

magical realism is not only peculiar to Latin American literature and that there are 

various examples in several cultures. Kumkum Sangari claims that nonmimetic 

narratives adapted by nonwestern authors, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s and 

Salman Rushdie’s works, are different from modern and postmodern narratives in terms 



 

  

11 

of ideological and political dimensions (157). However, literary movements do not have 

clear boundaries since the predecessor of an established or canonized literary aesthetic 

can be transmitted into succeeding narrative modes. The seemingly opposite approach 

of a certain narrative trope also acknowledges its precursor in a creative manner. 

Postmodernism, supposedly emerged as a counter movement against modernism, carries 

similar traceable narrative techniques. As Wang Ning states it is “a main international 

current of literature and art after the waning of modernism, both continuous and 

discontinuous with modernism” (298). Accordingly, the emergence of postmodernism 

corresponds to the Latin American literary boom. John Barth’s prominent essay 

heralding postmodernism “The Literature of Exhaustion,” claims that some narrative 

forms and techniques are worn out and new innovative forms require “expertise and 

artistry” (66). As an example of such original works, he focuses on Borges’ stories such 

as the “Library of Babel,” which he finds “particularly pertinent to the literature of 

exhaustion” (75). In his later essay “Literature of Replenishment,” he names the 

postmodern authors among which are Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo 

Calvino, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, whose works comprise of fantastic or mythic 

elements generally categorized under “magical realism.”  

While Barth speculates about the current usage of the term “postmodernism,” he 

suggests, postmodernists benefit both from pre-modernists and modernists, but do not 

merely imitate them. As he states, “A worthy program for postmodernist fiction . . . is 

the synthesis or transcension of these antitheses, which may be summed up as 

premodernist and modernist modes of writing” (The Friday Book 203). There are 

historical and canonical roots maintained by postmodernists and for Barthes, “The ideal 

postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and 

irrealism, formalism and ‘contentism,’ pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and 

junk fiction” (203). At this point, the definition of postmodernism corresponds with the 

definition of magical realism. In the essay “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism 

and Postmodern Fiction,” Faris suggests that magical realism is strongly interrelated to 

postmodern fiction. She names five characteristics of magical realism mentioned above, 

one of which is “[t]he magical realist vision exists at the intersection of two worlds, at 

an imaginary point inside a double-sided mirror that reflects in both directions” (172). 

In magical realist works, two different worlds are merged together. Similarly, when 



 

  

12 

Barth claims that postmodern literature is deconstructing binary oppositions, he 

mentions Marquez’s magical realist work, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), as an 

example. In his words, the novel is “the synthesis of straightforwardness and artifice, 

realism and magic and myth, political passion and nonpolitical artistry, characterization 

and caricature, humor and terror” (204). Rather than heterogeneous worlds, boundaries 

between oxymoronic terms and formations are presented in the same milieu.  

Faris mentions a common ground between postmodernism and magical realism. 

Metafictional texts, aiming to perplex the reader with “a particular kind of magic” that 

closes the “gap between words and the world” (“Scheherazade’s Children” 176), 

existence of childish stories and caricaturized flat characters, and labyrinthine narratives 

that lead to no end are characteristics of both postmodernism and magical realism. 

Magical realists’ ontological concerns with the text and language are similar to certain 

tendencies of postmodern literature. As Brian McHale defends, “the dominant of 

postmodernist fiction is ontological” (Postmodernist Fiction 11). The very existence of 

entity turns into a debatable and speculative issue. For McHale, “typical postmodernist 

questions bear either on the ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the 

world which it projects” (Postmodernist Fiction 11), and the questions he raises are the 

same questions magical realists problematizes, such as “What is a world?; What kinds 

of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What happens 

when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between 

worlds are violated?” (11). 

Theo L. D’haen explores magical realism in regard with postmodernism and displays 

the closeness between two narrative tendencies. As he puts it, “most commentators 

seem to agree that the very term ‘postmodernism’ originated in the 1930s in Latin 

America . . . and was reinvented or reused, covering different fields and carrying 

different meanings throughout 40s and 50s both in Europe and the United States” (193). 

He claims the features of postmodernism such as self-reflexivity, metafiction, 

eclecticism, multiplicity, discontinuity, intertextuality, parody, the erasure of boundaries 

might also be classified within magical realism (192-193).  

In a world, where the boundary between fact and fiction becomes less visible, magical 

realists as well as postmodern fiction writers show that historiography and fictional 



 

  

13 

writing are similar, intricate, and mixed forms. Although there are critics who state that 

there are certain differences between historical and fictional writing, postmodern writers 

problematize the borders and use new techniques to validate their writings and question 

“history.” As postmodern critic Linda Hutcheon claims, “the theory and practice of 

postmodern art has shown ways of making the different, the off-center, into the vehicle 

for aesthetic and even political consciousness-raising” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 73). 

It is actually possible to replace “magical realism” with “postmodern” in her definition. 

Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, and Julio Cortazar are 

among those writers who use historiographic metafiction in their works to deal with the 

notion of “reality” and “history.”  

In the twentieth century the trustworthiness of the form and the content it reflected 

became a matter of suspicion. Various philosophers from different fields questioned 

reality, language, knowledge, and history. Jacques Derrida concluded, “there is nothing 

out of the text” (158). The arbitrariness between signifier and signified, the problematic 

of thinking through of binary oppositions raised the idea of inadequacy in language, 

which meant language could not reflect the outer world but only the text and itself. 

Roland Barthes suggests that not the author but the texts speak since language “knows a 

‘subject,’ not a ‘person,’ and this subject, void outside of the very utterance which 

defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’” (Image-Music-Text 145), thus, 

“The fact can only have a linguistic existence” (“The Discourse of History” 121). 

Through magical realism, the authenticity of facts and history become questionable 

notions; the magical elements do not reflect reality and criticize the strictness of reality 

that is dictated. 

Foucault’s ideas about discontinuity also affect historical and chronological 

understanding. He disagrees with a continuous and organic historical approach since the 

idea of linear and coherent history is artificial. He claims that, “Be it historical, 

theoretical, or literary, discourse is always discontinuous yet held together by rules, 

albeit not transcendent rules (The Archaeology of Knowledge 229). Linear history erases 

brakes, patches the cracks, which is a function of discourse. The truth is produced 

within a discourse and its authenticity depends on this discourse. Magical realist writers 

also question the reliability of facts created by discourses. Formal history is written 



 

  

14 

under the influence of ideologies and magical realism is able to reveal marginalized 

histories or create a collective memory that is silenced. P. Gabrielle Foreman explores 

Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982) and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon 

(1977) in relation to magical realism, ontology and history, and says that “For these 

authors memory is grounded in the recuperation of the historical . . . [they] are animated 

by the desire to preserve pasts too often trivialized, built over or erased, and to pass 

them on” (285). Collective identity, the ignored history of slavery is explored in these 

narratives whereas these issues remain unnoticed in traditional forms. 

Naturally, discontinuity and the gaps in history bring up questions about factuality. In 

The Postmodern Condition (1979), Jean-François Lyotard claims, grand narratives fail 

while petite narratives construct their own versions of truths. He defines postmodern as 

“incredulity towards metanarratives,” and this incredulity is caused by technological 

advancement because “scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find 

truth, but to augment power” (Lyotard 46). For Lyotard, powerfulness is associated with 

reality and sustaining technological advancement means sustaining “reality,” which is 

used for scientific evidence to produce “truth” and rightness (47). Petite narratives 

question official history, institutional religion, and western ideology as foundational 

narratives. Latin American Literature can be viewed as a form of petite narrative that 

questions ideological and literary norms of western formations. George Yúdice, in 

“Postmodernity and Transnational Capitalism in Latin America,” writes that “the 

heterogeneous character of Latin American social and cultural formations made it 

possible for discontinuous, alternative, and hybrid forms to emerge that challenged the 

hegemony of the grand recit of modernity. Even history fragments into a series of 

discontinuous formations that undermine the synchronicity of the space of the nation” 

(87). The postmodern condition includes markers for globalization and the resistance to 

it simultaneously, which creates a paradoxical situation. Linda Hutcheon foregrounds 

the dichotomy in the following manner: “postmodernism inscribes and subverts the 

conventions and ideologies of the dominant cultural and social forces of the twentieth 

century western world” (The Politics of Postmodernism 11). Thus, it is hard to talk 

about a linear or chronological progress, and a mere dominant power, but a realm of 

grand narratives that are intervened and questioned constantly, which makes it hard to 

legitimize preexisting narratives. 



 

  

15 

 Lois Parkinson Zamora claims magical realism distorts “modernity’s basis in 

progressive, linear history: they float free in time, not just here and now but then and 

there, eternal and everywhere” (“Magical Romance” 500). The possibility of reaching 

the truth requires to go beyond the mimetic world. For her, “Magical realist texts ask us 

to look beyond the limits of knowable,” through which “binarisms, rationalisms, and 

reductive materialisms of Western modernity” have to be rejected. From this 

perspective, magical realism could be considered a postmodernist device. Besides, 

magical realist perceptions might contribute to improve an ontological understanding of 

the West (“Magical Romance” 500). 

Jean Baudrillard focuses on another aspect of the postmodern world, in which 

everything is just copies of other copies and it is impossible to know the real. Symbols 

and signs take the place of reality, and people live in a simulation. Being exposed to 

media images constantly, individuals start to perceive an imitation of reality, but this 

imitation neither thoroughly replaces the signified nor the referent. In this hyperreality, 

people are unable to make a distinction between the real and the representation. Such a 

world resembles the example in Borges’s fable; cartographers end up drawing a precise 

and detailed map of the empire which covers all the territories and thus, the map 

becomes the texture of the earth, where people dwell; lost in confusion between the 

construct and real. In this analogy, Baudrillard shows that hyperreal is the condition of 

living in a world generated by “models of a real without origin or reality” (1). Through 

metafiction, magic, unconventional reality and self-reflexivity magical realists, like 

postmodernists, explore this uncertainty. As John Thiem claims, magical realism has 

“extraordinary flexibility” in exceeding boundaries (244) and this enables it to 

foreground fictionality and reality through blending “possible but irreconcilable worlds” 

(244). 

Because the concepts are reconfigured, and the borders of narrative genres are blurred, 

postmodern literature subverts conventional norms and master narratives to 

problematize truth and adapts metanarrative, self-reference, and intertexuality to 

question the reality. As Linda Hutcheon suggests, it “confront[s] and contest[s] any 

modernist discarding or recuperating of the past in the name of the future. It suggests no 

search for transcendent timeless meaning, but rather a reevaluation of and a dialogue 



 

  

16 

with the past in the light of the present” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 19). While doing 

this, postmodern narratives do not claim to be “real,” on the contrary, these narratives 

emphasize their fictionality;  

Fiction does not mirror reality; nor does it reproduce it. It cannot. There is no 
pretense of simplistic mimesis in historiographic metafiction. Instead, fiction is 
offered as another of the discourses by which we construct our versions of reality, 
and both the construction and the need for it are what are foregrounded in the 
postmodernist novel. (A Poetics of Postmodernism 40) 

 In other words, postmodernism is not concerned with imitating the “real,” but creating 

its truth within the text and adding it to the world. Raymond Federman claims, “There is 

some truth in that cliché which says that ‘life is fiction,’ but not because it happens in 

the streets, but because reality as such does not exist, or rather exists only in its 

fictionalized version. The experience of life gains meaning only in its recounted form, 

in its verbalized version” (8). According to Linda Hutcheon, for instance, D.M. 

Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), which uses magical realism, challenges “the realist 

novel’s concept of the subject, both in history and in fiction” (A Poetics of 

Postmodernism 173). The novel starts with letters written by Freud and Ferenzci, who 

are historical figures, plays with historical aspects of the Holocaust, and in the last 

chapter, the revival of dead people is depicted with an “as if real” perspective. 

Rather than denying an external entity, postmodernism draws attention to the inability 

to reach the reality (A Poetics of Postmodernism 119). Therefore, Barthes suggests that 

“it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is to reach, through a preliminary 

impersonality—which we can at no moment identify with the realistic novelist’s 

castration ‘objectivity’—that point where not ‘I’ but only language functions, 

‘performs’” (Image-Music-Text 143). The text frees itself from any kind of discourse, 

including its author, and reaches an external existence by referring to its textuality and 

other texts, and it plays with signifiers to produce its own meaning. Magical realist 

elements seek meaning through dislocating conventional meanings of the words or 

images. A ghost, as a literary tool might be used to evoke emotions in the text such as 

anxiety and horror, but in magical realism its meaning is varied through reconstruction, 

and thus, such a device gains new meanings. Lyotard envisions postmodernism as a 

concept “that which searches for new presentations . . . in order to impart a stronger 

sense of the unpresentable” (81). Accordingly, magical realist modes of narration seek 



 

  

17 

alternative worlds and texts to delineate “the unpresentable,” but magical 

transformations provide similar devices adopted by postmodernism.  

The intrusion of a metaphysical element or an environment, for Brian McHale, is not 

uncommon in postmodern literature. As he delineates, “postmodernist fiction has close 

affinities with the genre of the fantastic, much as it has affinities with the science-fiction 

genre, and it draws upon the fantastic for motifs and topoi much as it draws upon 

science fiction” (Postmodernist Fiction 74). Although he does not label Marquez’s 

novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, as magical realist, he points out to the duality of 

the worlds, a fantastic and a mimetic world, in which the metaphysical elements are 

rendered into a “banalization of the fantastic” (Postmodernist Fiction 77). McHale 

claims that the main difference between modernist and postmodernist literature is that 

the former is interested in epistemological questions while the latter focuses on 

ontological problems. (Postmodernist Fiction xii). Through showing the contrast 

between “real” and fiction, mimetic and fantastic, the conventional understanding of 

reality, existence, and representation are challenged. For him, “This explains the general 

diffusion of fantastic ‘charge’ throughout postmodernist writing: a displaced effect of 

the fantastic persists wherever a dialogue springs up between different ontological 

realms or levels” (Postmodernist Fiction 83). If articulating ontological questions 

through different levels and realms is comprised in the definition of postmodern 

literature, magical realism could easily be considered as a postmodern form. In another 

essay published in 2013, McHale focuses on this similarity. According to his model, 

which is borrowed from Russian Formalists, a literary genre tries to find new techniques 

and innovative methods to get rid of its exhaustion “by shuffling the hierarchy of its 

features” (“Afterword: Reconstructing Postmodernism” 358). Therefore, modernism’s 

epistemological aspects are replaced with ontological exploration to replenish it. 

However, this difference does not mean that modernist and postmodernist literatures are 

thoroughly different from each other as stated earlier. Postmodernism stands against and 

benefits from modernism. A similar interaction between postmodernism and magical 

realism could be observed.  



 

  

18 

Kumkum Sangari suggests that “Western-centrism” is present in the definition of 

postmodernism. Although “postcolonial” literature or literary works from non-Western 

nations might be concerned with different histories and ideologies,  

such nonmimetic, non-western modes also seem to lay themselves open to the 
academized procedures of a peculiarly western, historically singular, postmodern 
epistemology that universalizes the self-conscious dissolution of the bourgeois 
subject, with its now characteristic stance of self-irony, across both space and time. 
(157) 

Placing Western literature and criticism in the center, and labeling the rest of literature 

as “third-world” creates the assumption that the West generates literary ideas and 

techniques, which is embraced and adapted by the non-Western world. In Sangari’s 

words, “[t]he expansive forms of the modern and the postmodern novel appear to stand 

in ever-polite readiness to recycle and accommodate other cultural content, whether 

Latin American or Indian” (157). Sangari’s view can be summed up as a criticism of the 

orientalist approach to literature, which Edward Said exemplifies through other cultural 

appearances in his influential work Orientalism (1978). Said also maintains that 

orientalism is a discourse, providing the West with an upper hand. Thus, displaying 

postmodernism as a distinct Western genre and denying the influence and contribution 

of other innovative forms—and especially magical realism—would produce insufficient 

and problematic explanations.  

Another western explanation of placing magical realism as a variety or branch of 

postmodernism could also be reversed. Brian McHale apologetically redeems his former 

argument, 

. . . the Boom in Latin American literature, associated with magical realism, 
actually predates the onset of postmodernism itself, or at any rate predates the use 
of the term in anything like its late twentieth-century sense. If the Boom dates, as it 
arguably does, from the early writings of Borges, Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Miguel 
Ángel Asturias, Ernesto Sabato, and others in the ’40s and ’50s, and 
postmodernism only emerges in the ’60s (and acquires its name no earlier than the 
’70s), then the magical realism that is a hallmark of the Boom cannot logically be 
regarded as a regional variety of postmodernism—if anything, the reverse: late in 
arriving on the scene, postmodernism might appear rather to be a regional variety 
of Boom writing! (“Afterword: Reconstructing Postmodernism” 361) 

For McHale, regarding Latin American or Asian literary works as postmodern was a 

false assumption that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s: the innovative fiction of 



 

  

19 

Marquez, Cortazar, and Carpentier were considered as the global effect of 

postmodernism (“Afterwords: Reconstructing Postmodernism” 260). However, this 

assumption needs to be corrected or, at least, clarified (362). McHale suggests three 

facts to explain how postmodernism has gone global. The first reason is the global 

economy, which developed similar conditions around the world. The second is 

dissemination of ideas and trends through various ways, such as academic programs and 

translations. The third is similar to the idea of the literature of exhaustion, which has to 

do with reaching a final aesthetic that appears similar globally. Reciprocal exchange in 

different fields has created these conditions. As he puts it, “We might imagine these 

intra- and inter-regional cultural dialogues, not routed through Western metropolitan 

centers but occurring among the so-called “peripheries,” as a series of calls and 

responses” (“Afterwords: Reconstructing Postmodernism” 363). The third reason seems 

to prove that postmodernism did not necessarily emerge out of the West, but different 

mechanisms from different geographies interacting with each other produced the 

cultural formation. The “dialogic moment” is the new possibility that reasserts a 

globalized literature instead of single-sided interaction. The influence of the West on the 

East, or the First world on the Third world countries, is replaced by a more universal 

environment (“Afterwords: Reconstructing Postmodernism” 363). 

Kumkum Sangari suggests a similar idea by stressing the uniqueness of marvelous 

realism. She points out the distinctive characteristics of postmodernism and marvelous 

realism through Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in “The Politics of the 

Possible.” For her, 

Unlike Euro-American postmodern fiction, which directs attention to the abstract 
processes whereby meaning is either generated never found or is lost in the finding 
(for example, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities), the self-conscious textuality in 
Marquez's narratives is grounded in an overplus of meaning, a barely controlled 
semantic richness. The conscious technical complexity of the texts does not ask to 
be read as an effect either of the autonomy of language or text or even as a gesture 
toward the auto-referentiality of art. Rather, the narratives gesture toward the 
autonomy of the story in its semantic aspect: stories exist above and beyond the 
storytellers who relate them, the language in which they are told, and the narrative 
structures in which they are held; stories are as protean as the people who tell and 
retell them, remember and forget them, repeat or improvise them. (165) 

Sangari claims that Marquez’s stories are meaningful with the notion of collectivity and 

the social space whereas Euro-American postmodern fiction negates the meaning and 



 

  

20 

directs the focus on the text itself. However, the reasons behind lack of meaning or 

collectivity in Euro-American fiction is not clear. The stories in Calvino’s Invisible 

Cities (1972) might “exist inside a continuous social space within which they can be 

remodeled and recombined” as it also happens in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of 

Solitude. The stories in Invisible Cities are narrated by Marco Polo to entertain Kublai 

Khan. When Kublai Khan asks him why he never mentions his hometown, Venice, 

Marco Polo answers, “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about 

Venice” (86), which indicates a countless number of recombined stories recycling 

within an imagined society. These remodeled stories do not necessarily direct the reader 

to the text itself; rather shared fantastic elements and myths are created similar to 

Marquez’s novel, which consist of a “transformative mode that has the capacity both to 

register and to engage critically with the present and to generate a new way of seeing” 

(“The Politics of the Possible” 162). 

Although Sangari tries to draw clear lines between postmodern fiction and the 

marvelous real, at the end of her essay, as McHale suggests in his third point, she keeps 

reminding that there is an interactive and inseparable transaction between Euro-

American and non-Western nations. Differences and similarities exist simultaneously: 

The history of the West and the history of the non-West are by now irrevocably 
different and irrevocably shared. Both have shaped and been shaped by each other 
in specific and specifiable ways. The linear time of the West or the project of 
modernity did not simply mummify or overlay the indigenous times of colonized 
countries, but was itself open to alteration and reentered into discrete cultural 
combinations. Thus the history of Latin America is also the history of the West and 
informs its psychic and economic itinerary. The cultural projects of both the West 
and the non-West are implicated in a larger history. (185-186) 

Accordingly, magical realist works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude create their 

own version of reality and history by introducing fantastic elements in a mimetic world, 

where they are considered ordinary motifs of the created setting. Marquez’s work 

consists of ideological, historical, and political elements that are created by the 

colonized and the colonizers, which implies different and oxymoronic layers within the 

fictional work. Hutcheon comments on One Hundred Years of Solitude and says, “[it] 

has often been discussed in exactly the contradictory terms that I think define 

postmodernism” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 5). Although a nation’s peculiar 

background of history, ideology, and culture might create a distinctive narrative, it is 



 

  

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hard to differentiate the effects of intrusion of the late capitalism and petite-history of 

the place. Hutcheon is uncertain about the borders between the two spheres and writes, 

“I would agree and, in fact, argue that the increasing uniformization of mass culture is 

one of the totalizing forces that postmodernism exists to challenge. Challenge, but not 

deny. But it does seek to assert difference, not homogeneous identity” (A Poetics of 

Postmodernism 6). The ultimate effect of globalization, regression of culture and 

heterogeneous structures of non-Western literature are intermingled like matryoshka 

dolls creating complexity and stratum in Latin American fiction. 

In her essay, “Territorialization of the New Imaginary in Latin America: Self-

Affirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms,” Amaryll Chanady suggests 

three attitudes of colonized countries towards colonizers. The first one is to “demand 

autonomy and respect for their difference” and also “to claim their superiority” (133). 

The second alternative is “the rejection of intellectual paradigms considered inadequate 

in the context of Latin American society” and to create a notion of “mestizo America” 

(“Territorialization of the New Imaginary” 134). Ethnic identity is attributed to social 

circumstances and intellectual and social interactions with the West. The third 

alternative is to claim ultimate superiority; either the superiority of the colonizer or the 

colonized. In all these three alternatives, European intellectual paradigms are questioned 

or criticized. In other words, their stance and identity either leans for or against the 

Western canon, which means the influence of the West is inevitable. At the end of her 

discussion, Chanady arrives at a similar conclusion and writes,  

the development of the literary modes associated with the neofantastic and magical 
realism that have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century in Latin 
America cannot be attributed by a naïve essentialist argument to the supposed 
marvelous reality of the continent or ascribed to the unidirectional flow of 
metropolitan influence. (“Territorialization of the New Imaginary” 141)  

Western rationalism and local thinking, modernity and tradition, and various other 

conditions shape the modes of Latin American literature. 

Theo L. D’haen, in his essay “Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering 

Privileged Centers,” criticizes the privileged position of Euro/American-centrism. He 

says that both postmodernism and magical realism arose in the 1980s, and 

postmodernism was defined with new narrative techniques, such as parody, 



 

  

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intertextuality, metafiction etc., which are considered as poststructuralist tools (193). He 

claims that the works regarded as magical realist also accommodate these techniques 

and refers to Richard Todd’s essay, in which Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus 

(1984), Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983), and D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981) 

are discussed. For Todd, although these works are labeled as magical realist, they gain 

this label “by way of the very same techniques usually singled out as marking 

postmodernism” (194). D’haen argues that magical realists like Garcia Marquez, 

Cortazar, Fuentes, and Donoso also use postmodern narrative techniques and criticizes 

McHale and Hutcheon for creating a “hierarchical relation” between magical realism 

and postmodernism. He questions the difference between postmodernism and magical 

realism since both forms use the same narrative techniques (194). As a distinguishing 

point, he asserts that being “ex-centric” is the prominent characteristic of magical 

realism and he defines ex-centric as 

a voluntary act of breaking away from the discourse perceived as central to the line 
of technical experimentation starting with realism and running via naturalism and 
modernism to the kind of postmodernism Lernout assigned to his second group of 
authors, the “metafictionists” or “surfictionists” a la Beckett, Robbe-Grillet or 
Ricardou. (195)  

The function of magical realism is to create a counter discourse against the hegemonic 

powers and the canon of Western literature, which is considered as “privileged centers 

of this literature for reasons of language, class, race, or gender” (D’haen 195). Un-

privileged, minor and marginal centers produce a type of literature, which attempts to 

dismantle the authority of “main” centers. However, he is not satisfied with his answer 

and writes, “Garcia Marquez himself frequently mentioned Faulkner as his example. 

The Southerner Faulkner is undoubtedly one of the most ex-centric, in the sense we 

have here given to that word, of American authors. Of late, of course, Faulkner has been 

claimed for postmodernism. Should we now also start calling him a magic realist?” 

(D’haen 201). 

On the other hand, decentering meta-narratives, as mentioned above, is also a 

characteristic of postmodernism. Linda Hutcheon writes “the theory and practice of 

postmodern art has shown ways of making the different, the off-center, into the vehicle 

for aesthetic and even political consciousness-raising” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 73). 

Using similar narrative techniques and decentering do not adequately explain the 



 

  

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distinctions between postmodernism and magical realism. If ex-centering is a 

distinguishing point, literary works dealing with ex-centered minorities, not to mention 

ethnic minorities, queer literature, insanity, addiction, abnormality, and any other issues 

dealing with inequality and the hegemony of the ruling class should be considered as 

magical realist. If fantastic elements are required to categorize magical realist works, 

how could one categorize Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), in which Billy 

Pilgrim believes he was captured by aliens? Furthermore, this work is considered to 

have elements of science fiction, but what makes aliens—who are not scientifically 

proven and who can be categorized as fantastic creatures—an ingredient of science 

fiction? The self-reflexive characteristic of postmodern fiction, allows the author to 

create a fictional character who can have a subversive conversation with his/her author. 

In other words, a pile of words revives and gains consciousness and this is not 

considered fantastic or magical but postmodern. 

At end of his discussion, D’haen does not come up with a precise conclusion and writes, 

“The exclusive attention given to Anglo-American modernism is in itself an indication 

of ‘privileged center’ discourse. In this respect, then, merely to talk of magic realism in 

relation to postmodernism is to contribute to decentering that privileged discourse” 

(203). Creating a subversive narrative is not only peculiar to magical realism since 

postmodern fiction does the same. However, D’haen suggests that magical realism 

might be a variety of postmodernism, but, evaluated in a context apart from the Anglo-

American perspective, magical realism becomes a distinctive mode. Nevertheless, he 

does not clearly define what distinguishes magical realism from postmodernism.  

In this context, closing gaps between postmodernism and magical realism enable 

reciprocal exchange. While magical realist works employ postmodern elements, 

postmodern fictions carry characteristics of magical realism. The privileging of 

postmodern techniques over magical realism has to do with the dominance of Anglo-

American literary canon, which dominates the literary scene. Although the general 

assumption is that postmodern techniques are transmitted into magical realist modes, 

the critics believe that the relationship is interactive. Contemporary American fiction 

utilizes magical realism and presents these magical elements in the stories regardless of 

the presupposed geographical location of the genre. Steven Millhauser, Aimee, Kelly 



 

  

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Link, and Kevin Brockmeier’s short stories in this study display that magical realist and 

fantastic elements are transmitted into the fictional works of Northern American 

literature. The analyzed short stories employ postmodern techniques and other literary 

tools, but also harbor the fantastic and magical realist modes. 

In the following paragraphs, an overview of the decline of postmodern literature will be 

traced and the location of magical realism, its adaptation and reformulation in American 

literature will be explored. As mentioned above, Jean Baudrillard’s, Jacques Derrida’s, 

Jacques Lacan’s, and Jean-François’s ideas dominated the 1970s and 1980s and 

postmodern literature reached its peak at the same time. Through the 1990s postmodern 

literature became more and more popularized, lost its dynamics, and was embraced by 

mainstream literature as well as becoming a part of the curriculum in academia 

(Tsoulou 5). For Richard Bradford, “The New Postmodernists have become complicit 

with the cultural fabric which most would perceive as contemptible . . . their radicalism 

tends to be attuned to the demands of the market place” (23). The validity of 

postmodernist relativism and anti-elitism lost its reliability and especially after 9/11 the 

critics have searched for new representations in fictional works. Linda Hutcheon, who 

profoundly contributed to the definition of postmodernism, writes that “The postmodern 

moment has passed, even if its discursive strategies and its ideological critique continue 

to live on—as do those of modernism—in our contemporary twenty-first century 

world” (The Politics of Postmodernism 181). In “Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an 

Aesthetic of Trust,” Hassan writes that  

Beyond postmodernism, beyond the evasions of poststructuralist theories and 
pieties of postcolonial studies, we need to discover new relations between selves 
and others, margins and centers, fragments and wholes—indeed, new relations 
between selves and selves, margins and margins, centers and centers—discover 
what I call a new, pragmatic and planetary civility. (204) 

An increasing number of academic works suggest the end of postmodernism and the 

idea that a new system should be modulated, which reconstructs the relationship 

between representation and fiction. Re-mapping Postmodernism: Contemporary 

American Women’s Fiction (2000) by Natalie Stillman-Webb, The Passing of 

Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary (2006) by Josh Toth, Strange 

Changes: Cultural Transformation in U.S. Magical Realist Fiction (2008) by Lisa 

Wnger Bro, After: U.S. Literary Culture, 1989-Present (2010) by Katie Ruth Muth, 



 

  

25 

Postmodern Materialism (2014) by Matthew Ryan Mullins, Literature After 

Postmodernism: Reconstructive Fantasies (2014) by Irmtraud Hubert, Metafiction and 

Cultural Production in Post-Postmodern American Fiction and Film (2014) by Paul M. 

Hansen, In Pursuit of the Real (2015) by Timothy Rutzou, The New Sincerity in 

American Literature (2018) by Matthew J. Balliro, and The Post-noir Novel: Pulp 

Genre, Alienation, and the Turn from Postmodernism in Contemporary American 

Fiction (2020) by Kenneth Jude Lota are several academic studies that discuss the 

retreatment of real after postmodernism. The common point of these studies is their 

focus on realism as the distinctive feature of contemporary fiction. Realism is not used 

in the classical sense, but the discussions center around what has changed in the 

depiction of reality. Thus, terms like neo-realism, renewalism, spectacle realism, deep 

realism, hysterical realism, and minimal realism have been used interchangeably to 

define the characteristics of American fiction after postmodernism. For instance, Toth 

and Neil Brooks claims that postmodernism is passé because “its increasingly loud 

movement toward silence and/or the absolute denial of objective truth claims become 

dogmatic, institutionalized and programmatic. Thus recent critical and theoretical work . 

. . seems to highlight the past hegemony of high-postmodernism” (“Awake and 

Renewed” 7). For Toth, an act of renewalism is necessary. He uses the specter analogy 

inspired by Derrida’s Specters of Marx, and argues that while postmodernism rejects 

reaching truth, mimesis, or referent, in the narrative modes that emerged after 

postmodernism there is a willingness to respect the specter’s spectrality (The Passing of 

Postmodernism 178-179). He refutes Lyotard’s famous definition of postmodernism in 

the following words and replaces it with “neo-realism”:  

neo-realism seemingly escapes the dogmatism of postmodernism by explicitly 
embracing and deferring the possibility of the referent, of mimesis . . . neo-realism 
works to escape the postmodern tendency to make a grand narrative out of an 
“incredulity” to grand narratives. Neo-realism seems to . . . respect the necessity of 
an animating, yet impossible, ideal—so as to avoid being dangerously compelled to 
either insist upon the possibility that the spectral ideal can become real and in the 
flesh or to emphatically and repeatedly expose such an ideal as impossible. (The 
Passing of Postmodernism 206) 

The ghost of postmodernism keeps haunting the preceding narratives, but these 

narratives employ new forms to deal with the ghost. In his conclusion, Toth gives an 

example from Beloved, which centers on a ghost-like character. For Toth, Beloved both 



 

  

26 

displays a ghost in the classical sense and a ghost that “embrace the ironic spectrality of 

the mimetic promise” (230), which is renewalist. Instead of refuting the “illusory 

ideals,” and emphasizing “ethics of perverse,” the ghost in the story underscores 

renewalist “ethics of indecision.” As Toth defines,  

While the postmodern aesthetic can be defined by a need to expose the 
impossibility of the mimetic text—or, what amounts to the same thing, the 
messianic promise—the shift away from postmodern metafiction is marked by a 
pronounced realization that faith in (or a gamble on) the possibility of absolute 
certainty must necessarily haunt any claim or narrative act (even the claim that 
such faith is a dangerous ideological illusion). It is, in short, this overtly renewed 
faith in an impossible “project”—a revenant of the Enlightenment, as it were—that 
can be said to define the narrative forms associated with the current epistemic shift 
away from postmodernism. (The Passing of Postmodernism 178-179) 

 
In Toth’s renewalism, the reality does not have to be in the form of mimetic. It might 

respect the ghost or the spectral, which means, unlike postmodernism, literature after 

postmodernism “embrace both the possibility and the impossibility of the specter.” 

Postmodern narratives present an elusive truth, which results in perplexity. Similarly, as 

Toth explains, the narrative of Beloved, returns repetitively to the slaughter of the child 

from various point of views to suggest “the impossibility of the certainly accurate 

narrative act” (The Passing of Postmodernism 230). On the other hand, the ghost 

becomes the essential reproducer of the narrative itself because the “impossible real,” 

the ghost, does not unfold itself in the narrative. Although Sethe tries to go on with her 

life, the ghost causes her to be stuck in-between. Toth defines this state as “ethics of 

indecision” and writes,  

the text’s emphatic willingness to undergo “the ordeal of indecision” is mirrored by 
the impossible decision with which Sethe was faced: to kill her children or to let 
them be taken as slaves. As deplorable as her ultimate decision might appear prima 
facie, the fact that she makes a decision at all can be read as a clear endorsement of 
the ethical imperative animating the entire text: the ethical imperative that any 
decision (or narrative act) must endure both aspects of indecision, that any decision 
must, in short, respect both the possibility and the impossibility of the spectral 
promise. (The Passing of Postmodernism 231) 

Similarly, the narrator’s reaction to the absence or the existence of the ghost does not 

reject the possibilities. Thus, magical realist characteristics show some parallelism with 

renewalist narrative strategies to reflect and reach a truth. The truth is not negated, but 

considered as a positive recognition of possibilities. This does not mean that the truth is 



 

  

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not problematic, but it means, literature after postmodernism, rather than struggling 

with the problems, looks at the extensions of possibilities beyond the truth. 

Correspondingly, other critics, who have been searching for new terms to define the 

contemporary condition of literature, reexplore postmodern techniques. In the process 

of a seeking new theory, critics like Brian Attebery, Raoul Eshelman, Nicoline Timmer, 

Robert Rebein, and Alan Kirby have focused on the relationship between fiction and 

reality. As a general inclination, they suggest that postmodern devices are maintained in 

contemporary fiction, but a new aspect of realism has come into prominence. According 

to Irmtraud Huber this new kind of realism  

does not revoke postmodernist claims about the power of discourse and the 
inaccessibility of the real, about the fragmentation of the subject and the 
impossibility of truth. Instead, it acknowledges them even while it asserts itself in 
spite of them. After postmodernism, we may find the ‘both/and’ (which 
postmodernism, thus a large critical consensus, has generally favoured over the 
modernist ‘either/or’) replaced by willful aesthetics of the ‘in spite of,’ or as 
Geoffrey Holsclaw suggests, an attitude of ‘true/but still.’ (6) 

Although the literary works produced after postmodernism do not aim to deconstruct 

the meaning as poststructuralists did, postmodernist elements are not entirely 

eradicated. On the contrary, they still function and present the perplexity of reality and 

truth. Nevertheless, as a difference, by using the same tools, the writers try to preserve a 

constructive nature. Robert Rebein debates the validity of the term postmodernism. 

From McGurl’s similar point of view, Rebein blames academic institutions for creating 

a dysfunctional term called postmodernism. In his words, 

From the beginning, its primary home was the university, a status that explains not 
only why metafiction in particular was often said to be fiction “of the academy, by 
the academy, and for the academy” but also why so many academics who clearly 
found it “disagreeable” felt called upon to support and defend it . . . Outside the 
English departments—and, indeed, even in “antithetical cells” within them, such as 
the creative writing programs—literary postmodernism was often seen as either 
ridiculous in its assumptions (all magic has fled from the world, it’s all been done 
before, etc.) or simply too limiting in its strictures. (6) 

Rebein’s comment can be interpreted in terms of the effect of academies on literary 

aesthetic. Under the title of postmodernism, some standardized narrative methods are 

used to frame a limited literature and its criticism. After claiming the artificiality of 

postmodernism produced by academies, he discusses that realist tendency has always 



 

  

28 

been in American literature, but inevitably postmodern tendencies affected the 

conceptualization of it. As he puts it, “contemporary realist writers have absorbed 

postmodernism’s most lasting contributions and gone on to forge a new realism that is 

more or less traditional in its handling of character, reportorial in its depiction of milieu 

and time, but is at the same time self-conscious about language and the limits of 

mimesis” (20). More or less postmodernist elements persist in contemporary literature. 

Robert L. McLaughlin, while exploring the agenda of post-postmodernism, points out to 

this tendency in literature, but he underscores the functionality of these elements. In his 

words, the post-postmodernist still continues to explore the limits and (im)possibility of 

language while trying to portray the experienced world; the post postmodernist 

is less on self-conscious wordplay and the violation of narrative conventions and 
more on representing the world we all more or less share. Yet in presenting that 
world, this new fiction nevertheless has to show that it’s a world that we know 
through language and layers of representation; language, narrative, and the 
processes of representation are the only means we have to experience and know the 
world, ourselves, and our possibilities for being human. (66-67) 

Furthermore, contemporary writers have adapted postmodern elements such as self-

reflexivity, metanarrative, and irony to such an extent that it is not possible to speak of 

these tools as distinctive components of a movement, and academic criticism has 

already digested every aspect of postmodern literature. Nevertheless, the only tool of 

literature is language and language still reflects the ambiguities of meaning and contain 

former claims brought forward by assorted scopes of realism, modernism, and 

postmodernism while literature prevails as a critique of society. On account of this, 

McLaughlin states that language is the only means for portraying other possible 

realities: 

Post-postmodernism seeks not to reify the cynicism, the disconnect, the atomized 
privacy of our society nor to escape or mask it (as much art, serious and pop, does) 
but, engaging the language-based nature of its operations, to make us newly aware 
of the reality that has been made for us and to remind us—because we live in a 
culture where we are encouraged to forget—that other realities are possible. (67) 

Although, I do not fully claim that the examined writers in this study—Millhauser, 

Bender, Link, and Brockmeier—are post-postmodernist writers, in terms of reminding 

the reader the possibilities of other realities, their fictions contain similar narrative 

techniques. However, what is meant by “neo-realism” that succeeds postmodernism is 



 

  

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debatable. After experiencing the postmodern era, poststructuralism, and internet era, 

turning back to realism in the traditional sense is not possible and nobody can have such 

a claim. On the contrary, Josh Tote believes that the association of the end of 

postmodernism with variations of realism does not present a clear portrayal of 

contemporary literature. Although these contemporary writers may be more realistic 

than Raymond Carver’s dirty realist fictions, focusing on the “the relationship they 

reestablish with a certain spectral inheritance, a spectral inheritance passed on by 

postmodernism” would be a more coherent definition (The Passing of Postmodernism 

132). Writers and directors like Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace, Maxine Hong 

Kingston, Dave Eggers, Wes Anderson, and Noah Baumbach use “narrative forms that 

renew the realist faith in mimesis while simultaneously deferring and frustrating that 

faith via the irony and stylistics of a now past, or passed, postmodernism. (The Passing 

of Postmodernism 132-33). With this in mind, fantastic and magical elements used with 

postmodern tools contribute to examine constructions of reality in a mimetic world. 

The writers examined in this dissertation use fantastic elements along with postmodern 

narrative tools and the mode of magical realism, but their stories re-modify the outputs 

of these fantastic, magical and postmodern elements. Although modernist and 

postmodernist concerns still exist in their work, the problems of modern life, language, 

and search for a meaning are handled with a relatively optimistic perspective. Mainly, 

poststructuralist ideas are exposed with a reconstructive conceptualization. The 

celebrated multiplicity of postmodern boundaries gains a practical function and the 

unrealistic depictions of the mimetic world reflect rational portrayals of the characters. 

In other words, the complex perplexity of the characters is designated in a flamboyant 

world, where binary oppositions such as sanity/insanity, real/unreal, and 

credible/incredible point out to a salvation in characters’ stranded conditions. Grand 

narratives fall apart and petite narratives occur, which produce different ideas and 

opinions, but they do not necessarily lead to solid alternatives. Although these ideas 

might be contradictory, they do not refute each other. In terms of practicality, they come 

into prominence as accredited substitutes. Through postmodern narrative tools, magical 

realist and fantastic elements existing in Millhauser, Bender, Link, and Brockmeier’s 

short stories appear as a process of self-making and healing of the self. In this process, 

unlike postmodernism and postcolonial literature, the fictional works neither aim to 



 

  

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emphasize the collapse of grand narratives, nor to reach an ultimate truth, but they 

underscore the methods of operation to reconcile themselves with their own truth. 

The short story as a genre also provides a convenient space for the presentation of the 

magical occurrences. As Charles E. May discusses the difference between the novel and 

the short story and highlights the capacity of the short story for the unconventional. He 

writes that “the novel . . . focuses on experience in the same conceptualized way. The 

short story, on the other hand, throws into doubt our idealizations of the 

‘interchangeability of standpoints’ and the ‘congruence of relevance systems.’ In the 

short story we are presented with characters in their essential aloneness, not in their 

taken-for-granted social world” (333). For May, the short story is a break from daily life 

routines and it is a pause to see the implausible, epiphany, or sacred. Short stories, 

considered to be stemming from oral stories, have their roots in ancient oral storytelling 

and are inherited from mythological stories. Thus, the representation of reality has a 

deeper connotation in short stories. This is different than the reality based on 

experience. As May states short stories have the capacity for confronting the perceived 

reality:  

The reality the short story presents us with is the reality of those sub-universes of 
the supernatural and the fable, which exist within the so-called “real” world of 
sense perception and conceptual abstraction. It presents moments in which we 
become aware of anxiety, loneliness, dread, concern, and thus find the safe, secure 
and systematic life we usually lead disrupted and momentarily destroyed. The short 
story is the most adequate form to confront us with reality as we perceive it in our 
most profound moments. (337-338) 

Magical realist representations in short stories are also used in various narrative 

methods and have replenished themselves. Magical realist narratives are largely 

concordant with the short story that embeds “the sub-universes of the supernatural.” 

Although magical realist and postmodern narratives have been claimed to be fading, 

similar formerly used methods are still observable in the examined short stories of this 

dissertation. These elements will be helpful to display the progressive panorama of 

contemporary literature.  

In the first chapter, I will present the defining features of magical realism. Although 

there are different definitions and debates about the characteristics of the mode, Amaryll 

Beatrice Chanady and Wendy B. Faris use similar terms in defining magical realism. 



 

  

31 

They do not come up with a clear definition, but they define distinctive features of 

magical realism. Chanady compares the mode to the fantastic, and explores what 

distinguishes magical realism. Faris comes up with five principles that might help to 

mark the borders of magical realism. However, she also expounds on the roots and the 

branches, which also reflect the pervasive effect of modernism and postmodernism on 

magical realism. As a common ground, these critics suggest that supernatural and 

natural elements should be included in the mode and should be presented in a coherent 

structure. Hence, it is natural to have an antinomy in the created world, which leads to 

unsettling doubts. However, “authorial reticence” may prevent the reader’s hesitations 

and emotional arousal. Finally, Faris suggests that magical realist texts induce the 

reader to reconsider perceived ideas on time, identity, and space. I will discuss Faris’s 

five principles, namely the irreducible element of magic, the phenomenal world, 

unsettling doubts, two realms, and themes of distorted time, space, and identity, which 

the stories adhere to.  

On the other hand, there are additional differences that reveal flexible borders of 

magical realism or the “post” state of magical realism. While collective structures such 

as colonized nations and other minorities seems to play a part in the emergence of 

magical realism, the representation of magical realism in the examined stories could be 

reduced to individual identities, which help to redefine their marginalized selves 

regardless of their collective identities. In these stories the authenticity or exoticism of 

magical realism, whether it is a Eurocentric or orientalist perspective, reveal indifferent 

representations. Rather than leading to a polarization, as it is traced in Latin American 

magical works, these representations depict a pluralization in American society. At the 

same time, through fantastic representations of a mimetic world, the characters in these 

stories find ways to depict who they are and who they are not, which compounds to a 

form of realism. 

In the second chapter, I will analyze how the writers use postmodern narrative 

techniques, such as meta-narrative, self-reflexivity, historiographic metafiction, and the 

ontology of reality, because these elements are essential in the magical realist mode. 

The postmodern aspects aid the characters’ healing process, which might seem 

paradoxical. Yet, this convalescence, rather than reaching a final conclusion, is about 



 

  

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interpreting their truths or realities. The standard understanding of reality and the lack 

of language as a tool of self-expression force the characters to create new 

fictional/fantastic perspectives. In the age of “post-truth,” believing in a truth, which is 

supplied by emotions, is more important than the factual truth, and fiction provides a 

vast area to observe what the characters are and are not capable of achieving.  

In the third chapter, the relationship between fantastic elements and genre fiction will be 

examined. McGurl suggests that postwar era creative writing programs are able to 

produce high-level “serious” literature that excludes genre fiction. As he puts it,  

The absence of genre consciousness in the program makes it clear how, even as the 
rise of the creative writing program was related to the parallel rise of mass higher 
education, it did not take its cultural bearings from the consumption habits of the 
lower middle class, but rather from the modernist tradition as it had been 
institutionalized in and as the New Criticism. (306) 

Educated mass readers were ready to read relatively complicated fictional works, but in 

time the boundary between high literary fiction and genre fiction was erased as 

exemplified by Joyce Carol Oates’s fiction (McGurl 308). For McGurl, “middlebrow 

fiction” is the intersection point of low and high literature. Günter Leypoldt interprets, 

“This segment was traditionally regulated by non-academic gatekeeping institutions 

(book clubs, The New York Times Book Review, or the Pulitzer Prize committee, for 

example), but it came under the school’s extending sphere of influence when television 

and film gradually ended the age of mass reading” (847). This expansion through genre 

fiction has been an embraced field where the writers are able to reflect their 

understanding of literary value. As Faris suggests, “magical realism reorients not only 

our habits of time and space but our sense of identity” (Ordinary Enchantments 25). 

This could be repeated for genre fiction, which does not mean sheer “entertainment,” 

but a narrative area where “multivocal nature of the narrative” and the characters’ 

“radical multiplicity” (Ordinary Enchantments 25) touch upon the problems of identity 

and culture. Thus, the fantastic elements in genre-based short fictions serve for the 

critical questioning of the self and re-interpreting it. Supplementing magical elements to 

postmodernist narratives and blurring the genre boundaries have contributed to present 

other dimensions of magical realism in representing troubles, pains, convalescence, 

individual experiences, and, to some extent, collective wounds of modern life. The 

access to reality and the portrayal of modern society have been reformulated and 



 

  

33 

recombined in these short stories. Fairy tales, myths, fantasy, and supernatural elements 

help to portray accurate modern-day life reflections rather than reframing or retelling 

traditional and archaic stories. 
 

 



 

  

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CHAPTER 1 

 FIVE PRINCIPLES OF MAGICAL REALISM 

The problem, as I see it, isn’t to choose between two opposed methods—the method of 
nineteenth-century realism, on the one hand, and the method, as if there were one, of 
modernism/fabulism on the other—but to write something that pays homage to 
whatever in the past is richest and most alive, while it sets forth on its own wayward 
journey. 

—Steven Mil