Date of Award
12-1-2016
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Chandler, Anne
Abstract
Monoculture represents a hindrance to literary ecocriticism. While the ecocritical project aims to think globally, doing so within the linguistic confines of a single language restricts access to very helpful (but non-Anglo) textual material. I argue that of this material, Gabriel García Márquez’s novels are particularly useful because of his unique execution of magical realism towards environmental ends. This project uses ecocritical scholarship to revisit Márquez’s works and to examine the ways in which his deployments of environmental magical realism synthesize and build upon ecocritical elements from earlier trends in Latin American literature while suggesting new venues of evolution for the hermeneutics of ecocritical trends. Through a close theoretical reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and the Autumn of the Patriarch, novels which represent useful case studies for his polemical use of magical realism, I conclude that Márquez explores and suggests ways the field of ecocriticism can parse representations of an adversarial relationship between humans and nature.
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