Maria Takolander

Theorizing Irony and Trauma in Magical Realism: Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright's The Swan Book

Abstract: Magical realism has been commonly theorized in terms of a postcolonial strategy of cultural renewal, according to which such fiction is understood as embodying a racialized epistemology allegedly inclusive of magic. The inherent exoticism of this idea has drawn criticism. Critics have recently begun to re-envision magical realism in terms of trauma theory. However, trauma readings of magical realism tend to unselfconsciously reinvigorate an authenticating rhetoric: magical realism is represented not as the organic expression of a precolonial or hybrid consciousness, but of colonial or other kinds of trauma. Through case studies of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, this essay intervenes in trauma studies readings of magical realist literature to emphasize the fundamentally ironic nature of the iconic narrative strategy of representing the ostentatiously fantastical as real. It also argues that these texts, while invested in representing the traumas of colonialism, are less interested in authenticating magic as part of a postcolonial or traumatic epistemology than in transforming fantasy into history and empowered futurity.

Shifting the “Vantage Point” to Women: Reconceptualizing Magical Realism and Trauma

ABSTRACT Magical realist literature and trauma are often understood in terms of nationalist and historical paradigms in ways that expose a phallocentric bias. With the convergence of magical realist scholarship and trauma studies—in response to the centrality of trauma to magical realist fiction—this phallocentric bias has in many cases been consolidated. This article attends to magical realist trauma narratives by women, undertaking case studies of the UK writer Ali Smith’s Hotel World and the Filipino-Australian writer Merlinda Bobis’s Fish-Hair Woman. Following the groundbreaking work of the feminist historian Joan Kelly, who demonstrated that adopting a woman’s “vantage point” revolutionizes our understanding of history, this article argues that investigating magical realism and trauma from the “vantage point” of women writers leads to a reconceptualization of what constitutes trauma and a redefinition of magical realist fiction.

Confessional Poetry and the Materialisation of an Autobiographical Self

ABSTRACT Little has been said about what happens when the writing subject cobbles together a self from the material of language in an always-unpredictable creative experiment. This is undoubtedly in part because life-writing scholars are not conventionally life-writing practitioners. In this article, informed by my experience writing confessional poetry and by socio-material scholars of creativity such as Vlad-Petre Glăveneau, I explore how the technologies of poetic language – bearing affordances and constraints, embodying social and cultural histories, and therefore exerting their own intentionality – are exercised in the creative act, giving rise to a phenomenological alienation of the autobiographical subject that is often explained in terms of unconscious forces or ‘madness’. I begin by discrediting myths linking creativity and mental illness in order to destabilise a traditional view of confessional poetry as generated by individual pathology, before going on to theorise the phenomenological lacuna in authorial subjectivity that such myths represent in relation to the potent technologies of poiesis. Ultimately, this article argues that confessional poetry arises from a distributed socio-material practice in which the agency of the author is negotiated through the agency of writing materials in the creation of autobiographical artefacts, thus exposing another limit in the field of life writing.