Magical Realism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Free University of Berlin (John-F.-Kennedy-Institute), course: The Subaltern Speaks: Minority Literature in the U.S., 17 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In this paper I focus on two considerable U.S. authors: Toni Morrison and Ana Castillo. The fact that these writers - who do not share the same ethnic background - both deploy the literary mode of magical realism in their works has engaged my interest to analyze and compare their novels Beloved and So Far from God. The purpose of this paper is not only to probe into the nature of magical realism in the two novels, but also to examine this narrative form as a socio-cultural practice which is connected to a special Weltanschauung. To enter this vast territory, it will be useful to situate the term magical realism in a theoretical and cultural framework which happens in the following chapter. Subsequently, I will expose how Morrison and Castillo employ magical realism in Beloved and So Far from God, and, in particular, I try to identify its function and the role it plays in terms of Morrison’s and Castillo’s cultural and historical background. In the conclusion I will expose the parallels which can be drawn between the novels, coming up with the thesis that for these parallels, there are two underlying main functions of magical realism.