Date Published:

Abstract:

This paper analyzes Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children within the framework of selected tenets of Karen Barad’s agential realism. With its focus on the inherent agency of matter and its uncanny creative power as well as intra-active entanglements among entities, Barad’s theory provides a context for a new reading of Rushdie’s magical realist novel. The project draws inspiration from quantum physics and points to the “spiritual” dimension of materiality while broadening the notion of agency to include all kinds of beings. Midnight’s Children exhibits a new materialist strand of the posthumanist perception of reality: the human body is depicted as embedded in intra-active connections with various kinds of entities, the human vs. animal opposition is questioned, and the non-human is appreciated. Most importantly, Rushdie accentuates the peculiar uncanny quality of matter. The paper argues that in Midnight’s Children human “magical” corporeality corresponds to the uncanny corporeality of the world.

October 2025: Malgorzata Kowalcze is an early-career researcher who holds a PhD in English literature and a Master’s degree in philosophy. Her principal research interests are in the fields of contemporary English literature, phenomenology, and posthumanism, with particular focus on New Materialisms. She is the author of William Golding's Images of Corporeality: Insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Body (in Polish) as well as of a number of papers published in international journals. Her articles apply selected posthumanist theories and ecocriticism to the study of literature. She has guest-lectured about posthumanism in Spain, Italy, Romania, as well as Israel and Uzbekistan. In her current research project, she explores the connections between new materialism and the genre of magical realism. She is an assistant professor at the Institute of English Studies of the University of the National Education Commission, Krakow, Poland, where she teaches courses in the history of English literature and posthumanism.