M.Phil Dissertation Public Defence

1. Under the Supervision of
Dr. P. Thirunavukkarasu
Principal
Rathnavel Subramaniam College of
Arts and Science
Sulur, Coimbatore
Done by
Sreejith Ramachandran
Reg. No. 2014PR469
Asst. Prof. of English
Acharya Institute of Graduate Studies,
Bangalore

2. Layout of the Dissertation
 Chapter 1 – Introduction
 Chapter 2 – Magical Realism in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
 Chapter 3 – A Postcolonial Search for Identity in
Of Love and Other Demons
 Chapter 4 - Summation

3. Introduction
 Literature – a social activity
a criticism of life
a mirror of its age
 Represents – life and society
 Defines – values and morals
codes and philosophies
“Representation is perhaps the most fundamental of
human activities, structuring our consciousness of
ourselves and of external reality” – Pam Morris
Proof of this – It shapes beliefs, opinions and
worldviews.

4. Postcolonialism
 A theoretical approach – concerns – lasting effects of
colonization in former colonies
 Postcolonial studies – a major discourse in literature today
 Colonization – destroyed everything native and replaced it with
foreign substitutes
 After independence these colonies struggle to find its own
‘self’
 Postcolonial works find their origin in the works of colonialist
writers like – La Casas, Oviedo, Gomara, Castillo
 Major Themes of Postcolonialism – Assimilation,
Appropriation, Hybridity, Diaspora, Alterity, Subaltern,
Magical Realism, Identity

5. • Gabriel Jose de la Concordia Garcia Marquez
• 6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014
• Parents–Gabriel Eligio Garcia & Luisa Santiaga Marquez
Iguaran
• Lived with Grandparents, Colonel Nicholas Roderigo and
Tranquilina Iguaran, till 10yrs of age
• A story telling family of many aunts, love and marriage of
parents – influenced him
• Political ideas were received from the Colonel and magical
from Dona Tranquilina
• Education – received scholarships and active sportsman
(Soccer, baseball, track)
• Turning point – Reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

6.  One Hundred Years of Solitude
 The Autumn of the Patriarch
 Love in the Time Of Cholera
 Chronicle of a Death foretold
 Neustadt International Prize for Literature – 1972
 Nobel Prize – 1972
 Legion of Honour
A study of his novels from a postcolonial
perspective would bring out the zeal of the
colonized nations which strive to create a new
identity

8.  Magical Realism – the art of intermingling fantasy and
reality
 History – Dates back to discovery of America and
Conquistadors
 Vespucci, Cortes and Columbus wrote marvellous
reality found in the newly discovered land
 They must have had preconceived ideas of what they
might see there
 Key figure of MR - Carpentier, Bontempelli, Flores,
Marquez
 In India – Rushdie, Ghosh, Roy
 Feature – Local and Native narrative traditions
incorporated into European realistic novel

9.  For Colombia – Magical Realism is its postcolonial identity
 Macondo – marked by extraordinary events
1. Father Nicanor raises six inches into the sky
2. The blood of Jose Arcadio’s murdered body flows into his
mother’s kitchen
3. Rain of Yellow flowers at death of Jose Arcadio Buendia
4. Remedios the beauty, rises into the sky and disappears
 Fantastic events are everyday happenings in Macondo
 Normal things become fabulous for them
 The use of hyperbole –
1. 32 Armed uprisings
2. 17 sons of Colonel Aureliano (all murdered)
3. 3000 casualities in the Banana Strike
all these express the enormity of violence and chaos in
Colombian politics

10. L.P. Zamora & W. Faris – “Magical realist texts are
subversive: their in-betweeness, their all-in-oneness,
encourages resistance to monological political and cultural
structures, a feature that has made the mode particularly
useful to writers in post-colonial cultures.”
 In Macondo, anything is possible
 Magical Realism as an oxymoron
 Eg. For MR: 1) Insomnia, 2) five years of continuous rain,
3) flying carpet
 Marquez wants his countrymen be original
 Imitation is suicide
 Keeps things in perspective and his people grounded

11.  Colombian Caribbean Coast – a major attraction in
Latin America.
 Rich colonial history
 Cumin and Rinaudo – “the social, cultural, political
and economic conditions of this place have a serious
background in slave trade, colonial past, and black
identities”
 In OLOD, Marquez adapt elements from Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
 Stoker and Marquez share similarities in themes and
misuse of empirical power by colonialists
 The novel surrounds an exoticized teenage girl

12.  She is demonized, molested and killed by church officials
 Marquez shows how a girl is tortured and finally killed to
save the Church
 He wants create awareness among the people that their
beliefs should not be misused by the church
 Gerard Martin – “though set in colonial period, is
conceived from the world after 1989 and is a much darker
world… Garcia Marquez saw a world going backwards.”
 Marquez uses duality with the title – Maria is dead of love;
ironically she is murdered by the cruel bishop and the
cleric who repeatedly abuses her
 She is neglected by parents, brought up by slaves and
identifies herself as one of them
 Her tribal necklaces show her African identity

13.  When she accepts the borrowed identity of slaves, she is
demonized
 This leads to her torture at the hands of the church
 It shows the exploitation of Black community and culture
 Marquez gets the desired effect using MR
 He juxtaposes the fantastic and the real for the desired
effect
 “Demons” are thus not limited to Latin America only but
to the entire third world countries where slavery is still
practised

14.  Postcolonial Studies - gaining importance since 1970s
 This study - an attempt to examine Marquez’s select
works in postcolonial perspective
 Marquez wanted to create an identity for Latin
America in the field Literature
 MR - Two opposing forces, suspended in each other
 It allows for political, cultural and religious leniency
 Marquez reconstructs Colombian history to bring out
the true history which was distorted by colonial rulers
 In OHYS, he reconstructs all major historical events
 In OLOD, he reconstructs incidents related to Catholic
Church right from the time of colonization

15.  Marquez attempts to carve out a new identity for
Colombia
 He positions magic on par with realism, through MR
 Reminds people of the calm and quiet pre-Hispanic life
 Colonization robbed away its tranquillity and brought
chaos and confusion
 Rewrites past so that people could learn from mistakes
 Wants people to be united
 Marquez has paved way for a great social and political
change in the years to come.