Magic in Three Contemporary British and American Novels: Trauma, Archive, and Spectacle
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Wu, Che-Yen
Abstract
Abstract
This dissertation is about magic and literature, magic in literature, and literariness in magic. It begins with one simple question: What can magic do today? Except as a form of light-hearted recreation and entertainment, or art at best, does magic have any “serious” function in a world full of traumatic memories, violence, and hostility toward the other?
Tracing its lineage, we can find that the dissemination of magic runs from top to bottom, toward the process of secularization. Its meaning and function vary from time to time. My further question is: When magic appears in contemporary literary texts, what food for thought does it offer us? I bring the discourses of magic along with theoretical approaches into three contemporary British and American novels to treat traumatic memories in The Prestige, archive in The War Magician, and spectacle of disability in Mr. Sebastian and The Negro Magician respectively.
Christopher Priest’s The Prestige is mainly associated with a family feud and a large part of the text is suggestive of imperialism, (post)colonialism, and disenchantment. David Fisher’s The War Magician is all about memories of the cruel Second World War. Daniel Wallace’s Mr. Sebastian and The Negro Magician has everything to do with a black man’s miserable story told by four freaks. The issues I treat in the three texts include traumatic memories of family, colonialism, modernity, archive of war, and discrimination against the disabled as spectacle. In the three texts, magic as trope to set the narrative in motion has potential for changing the given structure. I review the poetics, possibility, and failure of magic with regard to dissolving the identity in the three texts.
Subjects
魔術
創傷
檔案
奇觀
《奇術師》
《戰爭魔術師》
《黑人魔術師》
SDGs
Type
thesis
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