Shakespearean Tragedy and its Afterlives

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The pages of magical realist literature are inhabited with spirits, shapeshifters, and sprites alongside the most mundane phenomena—a leaky faucet, a city bus that doesn’t run on time, a meal that could taste a bit better. What does this juxtaposition achieve? How does the heightened sense of realness and unrealness in this emerging literary genre ask us to think about the worlds these texts create, as well as the world we inhabit when we put the books down? In this class, “Magical Realism: Spells, Specters, and Shapeshifters” we will consider how the genre of magical realism uses supernatural phenomena to engage with very real and, unfortunately, everyday problems like racism, colonization, misogyny, partition, and violence. We will examine how this form adapts to specific circumstances (such as the United States in the aftermath of slavery, or India in the aftermath of independence and partition). We will also consider how its generic conventions transcend nation and region.