Magic realism began and exploded in Latin America, having collected influences from the US and Europe, notably Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, and Woolf. I’m quoting Frederic Jameson, from his review of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, in which he ends by noting the ascendancy of the first global genre, magic realism. Amid all this flickering activity, it’s easily forgotten that today, for the first time in literary history, we’re perhaps not so far from realizing something truly global and lasting - not Marx’s world literature, but something different: “a world system of letters.” Loud, championed ephemera parade by, decades seem like eras, designations seem like jokes, and the deadest question of all - because of how boring it is - is how should the novel be. Literary history seems to have left us in a bog of temporal confusion. It’s difficult to imagine what a new and enduring form might be. What is the shelf life of novelistic genres in the twenty-first century? The produce rots quickly, it seems to me, or is thrown out before it sours.
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