An ‘axe for the frozen sea’ : Estrin’s magic agential realism, insect thigmotaxis, and the problem with Kafka

This paper seeks to demonstrate how Marc Estrin’s Insect Dreams: the Half Life of Gregor Samsa constitutes the first piece of magic agential realist literature about insects. The term ‘magic agential realism’ has been coined from an observed coincidence in the literary commitments of Estrin’s novel to the literary genre of magic realism and the posthumanist assumptions it shares with the agential realism of Karen Barad. Given Kafka’s axiom that a literary work ought to function as an ‘axe for the frozen sea within us’. A further claim will be defended is the claim that Estrin’s Insect Dreams is the magic agential axe that shatters the frozen sea of liberal humanist representationalism within Kafka. In providing us with a book that affects us like a disaster and like a suicide (both of which are evoked and exceeded by the ever-more pressing concerns of posthumanism), I will demonstrate how Estrin both fulfils the literary criteria laid out by Kafka to Oskar Pollak and opens up the possibility of re-configuring ethics in order to account for insects through the observed phenomenon of thigmotaxis.peer-reviewe

Los realismos en Beatus Ille de Antonio Muñoz Molina.

ENGLISH: This work deals with the current debate about reality and its literary and artistic expression: realism. In Beatus Ille, Antonio Muñoz Molina’s first novel, the fictional universe reveals three kinds of realism: the epic and elegiac realism, the historic realismand the magic realism. SPANISH: En este trabajo, abordamos el actual debate sobre la realidad y su expresión literaria y artística: el realismo. En Beatus Ille, primera novela de Antonio Muñoz Molina, eluniverso novelesco permite percibir tres tipos de realismos: el realismo épico elegiaco, el realismo histórico o contrafactual y el realismo mágico

A Theory of Genre Formation in the Twentieth Century

In his article "A Theory of Genre Formation in the Twentieth Century" Michael Rodgers explores the relationship between Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading and magical realism in order to theorize about genre formation in the twentieth century. Rodgers argues not only that specific twentieth-century narrative forms are bound intrinsically with literary realism and socio-political conditions, but also that these factors can produce formal commonalities

Colonial Trauma in Márquez and Rushdie’s Magical Realism

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children are hallmarks of the genre of magical realism. A typically problematic genre in terms of classification, this article looks at magical realism from a Freudian perspective, with particular reference to Freud’s notion of The Uncanny. Freud’s notion of uncanniness deals in displacement; it is uncomfortable, haunting and cyclical. The dominant presence of such uncanny effects in magical realist literature, I argue, reveals the haunting presence of colonial trauma within the current postcolonial psyche

Internal Realism and the Reality of God

How do religions refer to reality in their language and symbols, and which reality do they envisage and encounter? on the basis of some examples of an understanding of religion without reference to reality, I first answer the question of what ”realism’ is. realism has been an opposite concept to nominalism, idealism, empiricism and antirealism. The paper concentrates especially on the most recent formation of realism in opposition to antirealism. In a second section the consequences for philosophy of religion and theology are considered. How the reality, as it is considered in philosophy of religion and in theology, has to be characterised, if and how this reality is relevant for human beings, and what its relation is to everything else, can only be answered and clarified in a presentation in a language that is specific for this reality, the reality of God

Traveling the Distances of Karen Tei Yamashita\u27s Fiction: A Review Essay on Yamashita Scholarship and Transnational Studies

This essay provides an analysis of scholarly works on the fiction of Karen Tei Yamashita, contextualizing them within major shifts taking place in a number academic disciplines and fields that are addressing transnationalism

From the Poetry of Late Socialism to the Dogmatism of Democracy: The Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc before and after the Collapse of Communism

Using the examples of two films from the late socialist era, Roman Balayan’s Flights in Dream and Reality (1982) and Mircea Daneliuc’s Glissando (1982) and following Alexei Yurchak’s description of vnye as “deterritorialized milieus,” I plan to show how the entirety of the cultural space of late socialism amounted to what Foucault would term a heterotopic place featuring both simultaneity and juxtaposition. Finally, by further comparing this space to that created in the nonlinear postmodern era by Sergey Loznitsa in his documentary film Donbass, I will attempt to show that this cultural space, and by extension, the affective space of socialism right down to the everyday lives of the “masses,” unlike the totalitarian universe it is nowadays made out to appear, presented the early features of the very intermediality, non-linearity, and non-topicality we are celebrating in post-meta-narrative art cinema of the early 2000s. A home-bred version of magic realism, this Eastern European postmodern space should serve, due to its cohesive yet disparate nature, as a model of sorts for reconceptualizing contemporary views of post-narrative, transnational and, to employ Foucault’s powerful term, heterotopic media

Can free will emerge from determinism in quantum theory?

Quantum Mechanics is generally considered to be the ultimate theory capable of explaining the emergence of randomness by virtue of the quantum measurement process. Therefore, Quantum Mechanics can be thought of as God's wonderfully imaginative solution to the problem of providing His creatures with Free Will in an otherwise well-ordered Universe. Indeed, how could we dream of free will in the purely deterministic Universe envisioned by Laplace if everything ever to happen is predetermined by (and in principle calculable from) the actual conditions or even those existing at the time of the Big Bang? In this essay, we share our view that Quantum Mechanics is in fact deterministic, local and realistic, in complete contradiction with most people's perception of Bell's theorem, thanks to our new theory of parallel lives. Accordingly, what we perceive as the so-called "collapse of the wavefunction" is but an illusion. Then we ask the fundamental question: Can a purely deterministic Quantum Theory give rise to the illusion of nondeterminism, randomness, probabilities, and ultimately can free will emerge from such a theory?Comment: 22 pages. This paper will appear in "Is science compatible with free will? Exploring free will and consciousness in light of quantum physics and neuroscience", A. Suarez and P. Adams (Eds.), Springer, New York, 2012, Chapter 4. Most of the paper explains well-known ideas to a general public. We encourage the expert to skip directly to Section 7, in which we present our theory of "Parallel Lives