Escaping the Tyranny of Magic Realism? A Discussion of the Term in Relation to the Novels of Zakes Mda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Writer, playwright, poet, academic, activist and polemicist Zakes Mda is one of the most prolific and exciting South African artists today. Since the demise of apartheid, he has published 7 novels: Ways of Dying (1995), She Plays with the Darkness (1995), Melville 67 (1998), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), The Whale Caller (2004), and Cion (2007). The approaches to Mda's novels range widely. One term which has been applied to describe his work is magic realism. This article sets out to assess the term and its application to Mda's novels. It starts by providing an outline of the origin and definition of the term, followed by a brief discussion on some criticisms of its application to African texts, an examination of its application in criticism of Mda's novels, an outline of oral influences, some suggestions as to why Mda does not always employ this narrative strategy and a brief comparison of Ways of Dying to Cion to illustrate the points raised, and concludes by giving a brief overview of other approaches to his novels and an assessment of the application of the term in criticism of his work. Among the questions which this article aims to answer are: does the term have any explanatory value in relation to Mda's texts? If the term can be used to describe some of his texts, why does Mda not always employ this narrative mode? Even if its application is (at times) cogent, is it sufficient?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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 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".