Theory as World Literature (2024).
Sophia A. McClennen’s essay «From the Magically Real to the Really Real: When Latin American Literature Became World Theory» (in Theory as World Literature, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Bloomsbury, 2024, pp. 161-174) argues that Latin American literature was not a passive receiver of European theory but an active generator of theory in its own right.
McClennen traces the arc from Alejo Carpentier’s «lo real maravilloso» to Boom-era magical realism (García Márquez and his generation), showing how that narrative language ended up producing conceptual frameworks now used to think about world literature at large.
The central claim is that these writers didn’t merely illustrate theoretical frameworks already built in Europe — they generated their own, frameworks capable of reshaping global debates about what literature, reality, and representation even are.
In that sense, the chapter repositions Latin America not as a theoretical periphery but as a producer of theory with global reach — a shift from «the magical» to «the really real» that unsettles the old hierarchy between a North that theorizes and a South that merely narrates.
