This course studies the dissemination of magical realism in the literature of the Americas and beyond. It studies the rise of magical realism in the works of Latin American novelists, such as the Cuban Alejo Carpentier and the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, who after participating in French culture during the avant-garde 1920s and 1930s, saw potential connections between to local indigenous and African derived traditions with surrealism. We also study Gabriel García Márquez’s personal appropriation of magical realism in his short stories and his One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), one of the most influential and beloved novels written during the 20th century. The popularity of García Márquez’s novel helped usher a world wide magical realist fever, as writers from the global South and even the U.S. and Europe found in the style a way to write about social realities that had till then seemed too excessive for realistic or even modernist representation. Among the authors that may be studied in the course are, In addition to Carpentier, Asturias and García Márquez, authors to be studied may include, Arundhati Roy, Peter Carey, and Toni Morrison.