ABSTRACT
Blind to the dynamic cultural agency to the Periphery, Franco Moretti fails to see the Periphery as a constitutively generative field of artistic energy that endlessly impacts and transforms the Center, including in formal terms, even as it being transformed by that Center. The mutually constitutive character of Core and Periphery becomes especially evident in the case of magic realism. By incorporating non-modern traditions into clearly modernizing or postmodernizing aesthetics, it problematizes facile dichotomies such as traditional and modern, realist and modernist, form and content, and Core and Periphery. The contribution of Franco-Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier to the theorization of literature was to territorialize magic realism by rooting it firmly in the Afro-indigenous cultural soil of the Americas. A man of immense culture, Carpentier was deeply familiar both with Europe, where he spent much of his life, and with Latin America, where he also lived and which he studied passionately.
