Date of Award
Spring 5-20-2024
Document Type
M.A. Essay
First Advisor
Professor Roopika Risam
Abstract
Against Romanticism, European literary realism of the 19th century aimed to provide an objective representation of reality through mimesis that could capture the truth in an objective way. Yet, its positivist approach severely narrowed down the complexity of truth, reality, and the mundane by wrongfully drawing the universal from the particular. A new way of engaging with realist literature from any time period, called Marvelous Ordinariness, rearranges this triad in ways that expand our understanding of our own and other realities portrayed. Using Alejo Carpentier’s description of “lo real maravilloso,” Marvelous Ordinariness unfolds in three layers that resemble Carl Jung’s unus mundus: recognition of multiple realities, acknowledgement of different epistemologies, and as healing method for life’s pessimism. When read in tandem, the short story “Gazebo” (1981) by American writer Raymond Carver and the novel Temporada de huracanes (2017) by Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor, embrace some of the conventional notions of realism’s structure–as articulated by Roland Barthes, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács and Frederic Jameson–while also exemplifying how Marvelous Ordinariness can operate inside and outside narratives that are not labeled as such.
Recommended Citation
Ochoa Natera, Miranda, "Marvelous Ordinariness: Re-engaging with Realism’s Social Function" (2024). Comparative Literature M.A. Essays. 21.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/complit_essays/21
Included in
American Literature Commons, Epistemology Commons, French and Francophone Literature Commons, Latin American Literature Commons, Latina/o Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Other English Language and Literature Commons