Abstract
In “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism,” Rawdon Wilson appropriates a scene from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and revises the trope of the alien visit to reimagine a close encounter of a different kind. His purpose in doing this is to explain the handling of space in magical realist fiction. The particular kind of space that Wilson examines is what Roland Barthes refers to as “stereographic space,” the intertextual space “in which one text, or sliver of a text … pulls into its own textual space, some other text or shard.”1 Wilson goes on to add that in literature “one space can contain other spaces.”2 He asks his readers to imagine an alien world named QueAng-QueAng in which inhabitants use metal straws to drink the eyeballs of living creatures by piercing the center and sucking out the soft gel within. In this imaginary world, the people of QueAng-QueAng also “execute blasphemers in a similar manner.”3 Wilson then extends his example to London where he imagines that the aliens have landed to “practice their distinctive mode of punishment”:4 “Once they land, they will be like an alien world superimposed upon English space, their doctrines and practices folded into the world they have entered. That ordinary space will now contain them, encysted but highly active, and will inevitably make a little room for their cultural practices.”5
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Notes
Rawdon Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 226.
Gloria Naylor, Mama Day (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1989). All subsequent citations appear in the text.
Frederick Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” in The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Mentor-Penguin, 1987), 243–331; Linda Brent, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” in Gates, Classic Slave Narratives, 333–515.
Mary Prince, “History of Mary Prince,” in Gates, Classic Slave Narratives, 183–242; William L. Andrews, “Memoir of Old Elizabeth, a Colored Woman,” in Six Women’s Slave Narratives, ed. Andrews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Quoted in Leslie Ginsberg, “Slavery and Gothic Horror of Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 99.
Leslie A. Fielder, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960),
quoted in Teresa Goddu, “Vampire Gothic,” American Literary History 11, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 136.
Cedric Gael Bryant, “‘The Soul Has Bandaged Moments’: Reading the African American Gothic in Wright’s Big Boy Leaves Home, Morrison’s Beloved, and Gomez’s Gilda,” African American Review 39, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 541–53.
Je welle Gomez, The Gilda Stories (Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand, 2005).
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume-Penguin, 1988).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christabel,” in The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997).
Sheridan LeFanu, “Carmilla” in In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Susan Meisenhelder, “‘The Whole Picture’ in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day,” African American Review 27, no. 3 (1993): 405–19, 405.
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© 2013 Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez
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Reilly, D.J. (2013). Mama Day. In: Di Iorio Sandín, L., Perez, R. (eds) Moments of Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329240_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329240_12
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