This thesis has two aims. The first one is to elucidate how Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) functions as a Bildungsroman, and the other one is to demonstrate how the novel also has a coming of age aspect based on feminism. Whilst Alice matures in the traditional sense, she also in parallel does so as a stronger female fighting for gender rights with signs of feminism. The feminist angle as well as the surreal world of Wonderland makes the novel a not very obvious Bildungsroman in a genre dominated by male protagonists. For Alice to be a young female child who ends up in a fantasy world thus makes her a very fascinating character. The central hypothesis of this thesis is that what Alice is exposed to and reacts to in Wonderland generally reflects the genre of a Bildungsroman and also specifically a feminist Bildungsroman. Theoretical framework is based on the ideas of Franco Moretti, Mikhail Bakhtin, Thomas Jeffers, Carol Lazzaro-Weis, George Eliot and Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, as well as novels by Eliot and Stoddard. This includes dynamic protagonists, unpredictable development, symbols of modernity, the quest for universality, and minor characters who make sure that the protagonist develops, as well as feminist struggle by means of disregarding the „cult of true womanhood‟ in a genre and society dominated by men.

不思議の国のアリス = Alice's adventures in woderland

* Preface * Preface to the Paperback Edition *1. Preamble: A Post-Carpenterian Reflection *2. Lord, Praised Be Thou *3. Fugitive Island *4. The Parting of the Waters *5. Memories of the Future *6. The Pilgrim's Last Journeys * Bibliography * Select Bibliography of Carpentier's Works * Works Cited * Bibliographical Supplement to the Paperback Edition * Carpentier's Works * Works Cited * Index

Alejo Carpentier; The Pilgrim at Home

トラウマの物語としてのOranges Are Not the Only Fruit

close-up view of a clot forming in human blood shows beautifully how the different blood components are crammed into the plasma. (The scanning electron micrographs have been coloured to emphasize the different structures.) Red blood cells (red) are entangled with the fibrin (yellow) that makes up the scaffolding of the clot. The platelets (blue) — which initiate clotting — are fragments of larger cells called megakaryocytes. The inset shows the rough surface of a T lymphocyte (orange), which can kill infected cells or activate other cells of the immune system.

Thicker Than Water

Alejo Carpentier: Lo real y lo maravilloso en "El Reino de Este Mundo" (Alejo Carpentier: The Real and the Fantastic in "The Rule of the World").

Examining magical realist texts including Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1991), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2006), this paper discusses how magical realism examines the extremities of trauma and fear, proposing that magical realist narratives afford a unique ability to represent trauma in a way that is not open to the stylistics of literary realism. Blending the real or believable with the fantastically outrageous, magical realist narratives typically destabilise and disorder privileged centres of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, demonstrating the constructedness of knowledge and history. Accordingly, magical realist strategies are frequently used in interventionist or counter narratives that refuse to adhere to privileged versions of truth or history and insist upon a multiplicity of experience. The majority of magical realist scholarship explores how the genre undermines hegemonic perspectives of history to clear a space for marginal representations of the past. However, as this paper argues, magical realist narratives also provide a unique space for writing about experiences of extremity. Examining the role of fantasy in representations of violence and trauma, this paper proposes that rupturing a realist narrative with the magical or un-real accommodates representations of extremity by conveying the ‘felt’ experience of trauma.

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Magical Realism and Experiences of Extremity

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.

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

Depicting patently fantastic episodes alongside the traumatic events of the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien’s autobiographical magical-realist writing problematises pictures of the past and challenges conventional generic distinctions. Despite the often impossible and outrageous occurrences that punctuate his otherwise realistic narratives, and indeed the pointed and provocative revisions and contradictions of his self-reflexive texts themselves, O’Brien insists on his work’s authenticity. In line with critics such as Eugene L. Arva, O’Brien contends that his writing is true to the ‘felt’ experience of trauma—which trauma theorists largely characterise according to intensity, non-linearity and confusion. Nonetheless, rather than being pure outpourings of trauma, his works are clearly—and self-consciously—literary artefacts that often resonate with popular culture narratives. Undertaking case studies of the autobiographically informed magical realist novel Going After Cacciato and the short-story collecti...

‘A Thing May Happen and be a Total Lie’: Artifice and Trauma in Tim O’Brien’s Magical Realist Life Writing

This paper will investigate the relationship between prose elegy and magical realism in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It will propose that absence is generative, and that the state of melancholia—or unsuccessful, unresolved grief—is conducive to creativity.

Incredibly close encounters : magical realism and the intimate elegies of Jonathan Safran Foer’s everything is illuminated and extremely loud and incredibly close

Tim O'Brien is the award-winning author of nine books, in addition to essays and short stories that have appeared individually in publications such as The New York Times . Informed by the writer's experiences as a conscripted soldier in the Vietnam War, his prose fiction often defies simple categorization and – while ostensibly comprising, for the most part, works of fiction – can be situated vis-à-vis the genres of life writing, historical fiction, and magical realism. Postmodern in their playful and ambiguous engagement with referential history and biography, O'Brien's novels also resonate with Linda Hutcheon's notion of historiographic metafiction: that is, they are self-reflexive, allusive, and artful, pointedly problematizing their own claims to historical and biographical veracity. 

Jo Langdon

Papers

Magical Realism and Experiences of Extremity

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

‘A Thing May Happen and be a Total Lie’: Artifice and Trauma in Tim O’Brien’s Magical Realist Life Writing

Incredibly close encounters : magical realism and the intimate elegies of Jonathan Safran Foer’s everything is illuminated and extremely loud and incredibly close

O'Brien, Tim