A Diffractive Story. (December 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Coulter, Cathy
• Other Names: Carlson David Lee guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: Qualitative inquiry. Volume 26:Number 10(2020)
• Page Start: 1213
• Page End: 1221
• Publication Date: 2020-12
• Subjects: magical realism -- narrative research -- subjectivity; Social sciences -- Methodology -- Periodicals; Social sciences -- Research -- Periodicals; 300.72
• DOI: 10.1177/1077800420939207
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1077-8004

Abstract

Magical realism is a literary genre that offers possibilities as a posthumanist narrative research project. Magical realism employs literary tools such as a nonlinear aspect of time, a subjective sense of causality, and a conflation of the magical and the ordinary. Such tools offer possibilities in narrative research to create ontological sense-events that exist within assemblages that entangle the reader, the narrator, the place, the writer, and the participants temporally, spatially, and sensually within a flattened event. This article explores the possibilities of magical realism, offering a fleeting assemblage and a subsequent diffractive analysis. It employs a magical realist narrative construction based on a collaborative partnership between an Alaska Native village and a public university in which language revitalization efforts are sought through various school-based projects, including a teacher-training program, creation of subsistence-based native language curriculum, and other projects.