Ecological Magic Realism and Magic Realist Ecopoetics: Storying Place in Postcolonial Canadian and Australasian Novels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This comparative reading of contemporary Australasian and Canadian fiction privileges a reciprocal interaction between ecocriticism and magic realism within the field of postcolonial studies. My research shows that few works examine magic realism as a distinct aesthetic mode, while many ecocritical and postcolonial studies favour colonialist and pessimistic perspectives. Seeking to balance thematic and aesthetic concerns, my concepts of ecological magic realism and magic realist ecopoetics re-evaluate this still often misunderstood mode: its techniques in postcolonial narratives not only transcribe the cultural plight of the postcolonial subject, but also translate the missing ecological link between the environment and human beings. Informed by ecopoetic reflections on figurative language, Delbaere-Garant’s notion of mythic realism, and material ecocriticism, my concepts take the narrative and physical agency – or poiesis – of the non-human world as their focal point. Recognizing the dialogical web of human and non-human energies raises the issues of eco-imperialism as well as those of environmental and social justice. My thesis discusses two main configurations of ecological magic realism common to Anglo-Celtic and Indigenous texts within my corpus: synergy and crisis. These shifting interspecies relations are explored through the contexts of eco-spiritualities, scientific approaches to Nature, Nature writing, gothic-like metamorphoses, eco-apocalypse, and the Anthropocene. Rejecting dualistic worldviews, magic realism in these collaborative or competitive humans/Nature interactions remains ambivalent: on the one hand, it re-enacts human beings’ failed embeddedness in their non-human surroundings; on the other, it also re-opens the possibility of a mutually-enriching symbiosis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".