Normal Magic, Normalcy, and Explanation in Popular Fantasy and Magical Realism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is intuitively clear that the genre of magical realism is distinct from a variety of superficially comparable genres. An important component of this intuition is the distinct nature of the effects of magical realism on the reader: One often has the impression that the narrative is not playing by the same rules or following the same conventions as other works with similar constellations of plot elements. In the present article, I will explore the basis of this distinctiveness by considering how the characteristics of magical realism apply to popular fantasy. In particular, I will argue that popular fantasy is similar to magical realism in that they both present fantasy elements as a part of the story world. A wide range of relationships between the story world and our own world can be found in popular fantasy works. However, in at least a few cases, fantasy elements are presented without explanation in a world that is recognizably our own, comparable to what is said to be found in magical realism. In contrast, popular fantasy seems to be uniformly different from magical realism in the apparent coherence that those elements have in the story world. The starting point for the present analysis is the criteria proposed by Chanady (1985). She argued that magical realism is distinct from at least some other genres in that fantasy elements are presented as part of the real world and are interpreted as or uneventful by the narrator and story world characters. I refer to this as the characteristic of normal magic. Further, she argued that works in the magical realist genre lack an explanation of the apparent discrepancy between the fantasy elements and the real world. The thesis of the present article, though, is that these properties can also be found in examples of popular fantasy. In order to make this point, it is necessary to be clear on what these criteria entail, and in particular, to delineate precisely
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".