‘Magical Realism’ Existentialized in Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the very onset of its literary transformation, magical realism has taken on Postcolonial and Postmodern stances toward the appropriation of cultural identity. Normalizing the invasion of cultural history and heritage – having become long-forgotten myths of culture – in a modernized setting, gives cultural identity the presencing urgency its authenticity requires, thus creating a postcolonial text or a postmodern individual reminded of an indigenous identity. However, from the standpoint of a war-torn country, this paper argues that the genre requires immediate presencing of existential nature to that which invokes cultural heritage. In other words, in the context of war, an immediate act of presencing is required as otherwise the subject’s inaction may be the cause of not mere identity but also physical nonexistence. In this sense, immediate urgency affected by direct contact with chaos is understood to require a more immediate approach than those offered by postcolonialism and postmodernism. The study then investigates the possibility of fathoming magical realism from an Existential lens within the context of war as projected in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, especially when a calling shifts from individual retribution to victimization, thus taking the analysis typically associated with the genre a step further.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".