Magical Realism

This course explores magical realism as a literary mode rooted not in escapist fantasy, but in cultural ways of knowing that emerge in response to historical trauma, political upheaval, personal loss, and the limits of ordinary language.

In magical realist texts, the extraordinary does not replace reality—it intensifies it.

Ghosts walk into kitchens, the dead speak, time folds, animals prophesy, and miracles occur without narrative surprise.

Yet the stakes remain grounded in lived experience: colonization, dictatorship, migration, war, environmental devastation, family rupture, and spiritual crisis.