Shelby Meyers

Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Dimino, Andrea

Area of Concentration

Humanities

Abstract

García Márquez and Toni Morrison, both Nobel Prize winners, write powerfully about characters seeking freedom from trauma caused by colonialism and slavery. Characters’ efforts often involve what the dominant western culture would call the supernatural, such as divination, witchcraft, and flight. Each writer focuses primarily with families and community. Although men play a strong role in these works, women characters in particular possess a unique relationship with the supernatural and aid other characters in understanding, predicting, and overcoming fate. In the introduction, I deal with trauma theory in terms of the psychological and historical, concerning non-western, postcolonial, and minority people. Examining the two author’s texts in the following chapters, I also emphasize a formal critical approach. Both authors have connections with magical realism, although only García Márquez is directly involved in this genre. The first chapter of my thesis examines García Márquez’s fiction: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (1955), and “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother” (1972). In chapter two, I discuss Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), Paradise (1997), and Beloved (1987). The conclusion focuses on both of their Nobel Prize lectures; in their lectures, García Márquez writes of hope for humankind and Morrison stresses the importance of listening to other people’s stories. Their fiction includes elements of hope, but in complex way. Although both authors have rooted their works in their own cultures, their fictions have gained importance in a global context.

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