We are looking for contributions to a working group at the 2027 MLA Annual Convention in Los Angeles. The panel will discuss the evolution of magical realism in the 21st century, formally, medially, and geographically. Besides the fundamental elements of magical realism scholarship covering literature and film in South-American and European contexts, the scope of the presentations will extend to geocultural locations such as Africa, the Middle East, East- and South-East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, and to theoretical approaches including literary trauma theory, postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and virtual reality theory. Through a growing diversity of artistic modes of representation and even (lately) through empirical fields of knowledge, magical realism continues to strengthen our anchoredness in the known or knowable reality by filling the void, the absences, the traumatic black holes in our experience of it.

Presentations may choose to follow the storytelling mode, in both its literary and cinematic forms, within the growingly complex field of literary trauma theory, ecocriticism, and virtual reality theory (the simulation hypothesis). Magical realism brings order to the incoherence and randomness of memories originating in limit-events such as historical traumata and ecological disasters (natural or manmade). Fictional simulation, and particularly magical realist storytelling, does not yield a copy of reality but a simulacrum (to borrow Jean Baudrillard’s concept), an augmented reality, whose sense and coherence exist exclusively on the level of the magical realist text, independently of non-textual reality. In a recent development, as an A.I.-generated narrative, a story without a human consciousness behind it, magical realism may arguably confirm Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument (2003), which assumes that consciousness is not uniquely tied to biological brains, but can arise from any system that implements the right computational structures and processes.

Panelists are invited to address the actual and the virtual in magical realist narratives, and to focus on metatextual elements, on stories within stories, on the recurring motifs of artistic creation and imagination, and on the “double bind” inherent in the writing mode. We welcome any argument pointing to the versatility and self-perpetuating originality of magical realism in fiction, film, and A.I. simulation in the 21st century.

Please submit a 400-word/one-page abstract along with a short bio and institutional affiliation to Eugene Arva at magicreal@aol.com by March 20, 2026. The MLA website (Working Groups 2027) will be open for submissions starting March 1, 2026.