Magical Realism
Magical realism is a literary genre that blends realistic settings and events with elements of the supernatural or magical. It often involves the coexistence of the ordinary and extraordinary, creating a sense of wonder and mystery within everyday life. This genre is characterized by its unique fusion of the mundane and the fantastical, challenging traditional notions of reality in storytelling.
8 Key excerpts on "Magical Realism"
- Carrie Hintz, Eric L. Tribunella(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Broadview Press(Publisher)
...Even the magical ones are defined by their human as well as magical traits. The real world, then, becomes somewhat illuminated by these characters who can span both worlds. For example, teachers at Hogwarts can be imaginative and compassionate; they are also flighty, vindictive, dim-witted, indulgent, lazy, frightened, and frightening. Students are clever, kind, weak, cruel, snobbish. Lessons are inspiring and tedious—as in the best and worst of real schools. (253) Readers can be engaged not only by Rowling’s fantasy environment but also by the realistic interpersonal dynamics of Harry and his friends, including the teenage romances that play an increasing role in the later books. Both fantasy and realism have the capacity to engage children on political and social issues. For example, the Harry Potter series tackles race and class discrimination when a Pureblood Wizard faction targets “Mudbloods” (Muggleborn wizards and witches). Although such struggles are set in a fantastic world, they have obvious relevance to struggles in our own political and social spheres. Magical Realism Magical Realism, which has traditionally been associated with Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, combines realism and fantasy. In Don Latham’s words, Magical Realism presents “a matter-of-fact world in which the extraordinary exists side by side with the mundane realities of everyday life” (59). Magical Realism does not involve the creation of a separate fantasy environment such as Narnia or Middle Earth. It does, however, include the presence of magic in our own world, and in this way is similar to Townsend’s notion of fantasy that inhabits our world and Mendlesohn’s concept of the intrusion fantasy. In Latham’s view, Magical Realism for young adults helps portray “an alternative—and perhaps subversive—view of society” (62)...
eBook - ePub- Felicity Gee(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...These sensory interruptions, whether they expand and become intellectual questions or not, constitute a tension, where the mystery does not descend from on high, but dwells within the everyday. As magic-realist filmmaker Lisa Stock puts it, magic realism involves: ‘The small glimmers that maybe only you see. […] The challenge then, may be in creating new metaphors or images not attached to a kind of nomenclature, that transcend cultures and generations, as does [Borges’s] Book of Sand ’. 4 In our contemporary moment, magic realism can prove fruitful as a language of change, of becoming: a subtle poetic-politics. In the 1990s, a renewed interest in literary magic(al) realism sparked a flurry of critical anthologies and publications in the English language, building on Chanady’s Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy (1985); Raymond Trousson’s ‘Du Fantastique et du Merveilleux au Réalisme Magique’ (1985) and María-Elena Angulo’s Magic Realism Social Context and Discourse (1995) among many others, which argue for magic realism as a distinct mode. William Spindler’s (1993) ‘Magic Realism: A Typology’ considers the overlap between European and Latin American variants, setting out three thematic categories: metaphysical magic realism; anthropological magic realism; and ontological magic realism. 5 Lois Parkinson Zamora’s and Wendy Faris’s Magical Realism: Theory, History and Community (1995), followed by Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang’s A Companion to Magical Realism a decade later (2005) provide translations of key foundational texts, as well as a reassessment of magic(al) realism in later twentieth-century postcolonial and commonwealth writers...
- Ursula Kluwick(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Neither of those two tendencies permeates works of Magical Realism, where the principal thing is not the creation of imaginary beings or worlds but the discovery of the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances. The existence of the marvelous real is what started magical realist literature, which some critics claim is the truly American literature. (Leal 121–22) This passage already indicates another of Leal's legacies: wishing to prove magic realism authentically Latin American, he was concerned with establishing a clear distinction between magic realism and recent European trends of writing, such as surrealism, the fantastic, science fiction, psychological, and modernist literature. Once again, we find that the notion of harmony is implicitly used in order to distinguish magic realism from other forms of literature: Unlike superrealism, Magical Realism does not use dream motifs; neither does it distort reality or create imagined worlds, as writers of fantastic literature or science fiction do; nor does it emphasize psychological analysis of characters, since it doesn't try to find reasons for their actions or their inability to express themselves. Magical Realism is not an aesthetic movement either, as was modernism, which was interested in creating works dominated by a refined style; neither is it interested in the creation of complex structures per se. 7 (Leal 121) The differences between magic realism and related genres such as the fantastic, fantasy literature, and science fiction have become a major concern in contemporary magic realist criticism, and efforts to define magic realism in opposition to these genres continue today...
eBook - ePubDon't Forget to Write for the Elementary Grades
50 Enthralling and Effective Writing Lessons (Ages 5 to 12)
- Jennifer Traig, Jennifer Traig(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Jossey-Bass(Publisher)
...Chapter 7 Magic Realism by Aimee Bender 1 session, 2 hours What's magic realism? In One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of the major books of Magical Realism, one of Gabriel García Márquez's characters walks around surrounded by yellow butterflies. Nothing else is particularly magical about him—he's a living, breathing, regular person but just happens to have this extra magnetic butterfly ability. In magic realism, the world looks a whole lot like our daily world, it's proportionally our world, but some elements in it are magical and they are woven right into the realistic story line. People might fly. Something unexpected might rustle up from the ground. What's that unusual rabbit? What's the deal with John's right arm? In this class, students learn to create magic realist writing of their own. Writing with magical elements is fun, amazingly fun, because you can explore the consequences of one small but significant shift in the universe and the ripple effects can change the whole story line. Begin with a short story: “The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez, or “Hirschel” by Judy Budnitz, or “Jon” by George Saunders (which is long). Talk about what happens when this shift occurs. When a man shows up with wings, or when a baker makes people, or when there's teen demographic camp as in the story, “Jon.” Talk about the connection between the two words “magic” and “logic,” which happen to share three letters but usually aren't thought of together. But they're so related! Magic relies on logic; we need to feel like the world makes sense, even if it's a different world. What are the consequences of one meaningful change in these stories? Most of the exercises I have around this subject are building from the ground up, meaning the students can dive into a wild topic, and see what happens. Sometimes, this ends up as absolute realism, which is fine, too. Exercise 1: Telling a Legend Pass around two index cards for each student...
eBook - ePubMagic Realism
Social Context and Discourse
- Maria-Elena Angulo(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...As noted by França Danese in his minute review of Chiampi's book, O realismo maravilhoso opens new possibilities for understanding the renovation of narrative language in Latin America (46). This complex study which implies poetic elements as well as the ideology of the Latin American literary production is appropriate for analyzing current narrative. Five years after Chiampi's study, Graciela N. Ricci in her book Realismo mágico y conciencia mítica en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Garcia Cambeiro, 1985), adopts the term "realismo mágico-maravilloso" (RMM), combining the two terms proposed by earlier critics and Chiampi. According to Ricci the definition "realismo mágico-maravilloso" is: la más pertinente pues, además de diferenciarse, de este modo, del concepto europeo origiiial aplicado a las artes plásticas ("Realismo Mágico") y del otro concepto europeo, estrictamente literario y alejado de la realidad ("lo maravilloso"), permite las necesarias conexiones entre una literatura y su actión fundamervtalmente revolucionaria, y la conciencia de Latinoamérica; reafirmando así la convictión irrenunciable de "reconocerse en la propia palabra". (56) Ricci studies the problematic of Magical Realism considering that the poetics of the Latin American narrative and its "efecto de encantamiento" (enchantment effect) are based on the structural equivalence of text and contexts. There is an analogy between the archetype consciousness of culture and the RMM narrative. Magical Realism is treated as part of the Latin American cultural context and also as part of the unconscious of its writers. The first part of Ricci's study is a diachronic analysis of the evolution of consciousness. She studies the different mythical cycles that occur in the development of every individual or collective consciousness and the symbolic function of the psyche (49). Myth, symbol of second degree (Ricoeur), is a metalanguage which refers to a sphere beyond the concepts already known (34)...
eBook - ePubMagical Realism and Cosmopolitanism
Strategizing Belonging
- K. Sasser(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...In this chapter, I want to step back and look generally at Magical Realism as a literary form in order to ask whether this narrative mode’s distinctive features, those aspects that position it as a unique storytelling mode, might allow it, correspondingly, to make distinctive contributions to the contemporary cosmopolitan conversation. Considering aspects brought to the surface in the previous chapters, namely the specific concern with belonging, as well as looking ahead to other potential avenues of inquiry, I suggest that Magical Realism possesses (at least) three characteristics that position it as a welcome and vital contributor: bidimensionality, spectacality (if I may coin a word), and antinomy. Bidimensionality Bidimensionality refers to Magical Realism’s dual structure, comprised as it is by the codes of magic and realism. As Amaryll Chanady discusses this feature, the two codes entail two dimensions, or levels, of reality: the real, wherein the supernatural conflicts with the laws of the storyworld, and the magical, wherein the supernatural is compatible. These two codes and their concomitant dimensions of reality never merge into one, but remain distinct, if interpenetrated. In Chapter 2, I posited that one of the chief benefits that narrative offers cosmopolitanism is narrative enfleshment: literature provides a welcomingly constraining narrative skin whereby cosmopolitan ideas can be tried on. Characters, narrative arcs, and particular contexts thereby offer a kind of testing ground for views discussed among cosmopolitanism’s theoretical branch. This function is especially valuable within cosmopolitan discourse because the concerns of cosmopolitans involve diverse and complex phenomena (this project’s concern with belonging, for instance), making particular, even if imagined, examples of how people experience them especially advantageous...
eBook - ePubFantasy and Mimesis (Routledge Revivals)
Responses to Reality in Western Literature
- Kathryn Hume(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...If we look at western literature historically, we find all sorts of departures from consensus reality throughout its span, in the works of such major authors as Homer and Virgil; Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Pynchon; Crétien de Troyes and Rabelais; Gottfried of Strassburg, Thomas Mann, and Kafka; Dante and Calvino. There are genres and works that eschew fantasy throughout this span, and in the nineteenth century fantasy was consciously pushed to the periphery by the upholders of the realistic novel, but fantasy has generally been a well-established part of mainstream narrative, and is now well re-established in contemporary fiction. To do justice to this all-but-universal phenomenon, we must abandon the assumption that mimesis, the vraisemblance to the world we know, is the only real part of literature; give up the notion that fantasy is peripheral and readily separable. We must start instead from the assumption that literature is the product of both mimesis and fantasy, and talk about mimetic and fantastic elements in any one work. Only then can we hope to approach literature without the distortion of perspective bequeathed to us by Plato and Aristotle. My working definition is therefore of the simplest sort, and much like W.R. Irwin’s. Fantasy is any departure from consensus reality, an impulse native to literature and manifested in innumerable variations, from monster to metaphor. It includes transgressions of what one generally takes to be physical facts such as human immortality, travel faster than light, telekinesis, and the like. Telepathy, although it may show up as a statistical effect in Rhine Institute studies of card-calling, does not work on the communication-as-if-by-telephone principle that some fiction displays, so that too is fantasy...
eBook - ePubLiterature and Religious Experience
Beyond Belief and Unbelief
- Matthew J. Smith, Caleb D. Spencer, Matthew J. Smith, Caleb D. Spencer(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...It tells stories of the embodied self’s realization to train the moral character of the reader. Depending on the technique of myth as a reading strategy, the realist novel shares with the liberal model of religion the same task of guiding the modern subject in self-cultivation toward self-fulfillment. What interests me, however, is what was subsumed against and underneath the realist novel, namely, the non-realist fantasy. Unfortunately, the confines of history and the mythical technique still serve as the major points of reference in the study of fantasy. For instance, Jackson, one of the early scholars of fantasy, celebrates the fantastic mode for unleashing repressed desires to dismantle the bourgeois category of the “real,” “the concept of ‘character’ and its ideological assumptions,” but excludes popular fantasy that invokes magic and invents otherworlds from the fantastic mode. 22 She believes that magic has been surpassed by religion and science and the return of the “outdated” magic signals an escape from human history and the stabilization of the status quo. Unlike Jackson, Attebery focuses his research on genre fantasy. He defines myth as “any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief.” 23 Myth comes from the premodern and non-Western worlds, while fantasy is a modern attempt to reframe and recontextualize myth. For Attebery, the realist novel, myth, and fantasy are all symbolic structures not expected to be concerned with the question of propositional validity. More specifically, realist fiction invites metonymical reading because the invented characters and stories are still connected to reality. In comparison, both myth and fantasy, more fictional than the realist fiction, are to be read metaphorically (or, according to Asad, mythically). Myth and fantasy differ in that the former designates sacred narratives offering moral teachings while the latter is to extend entertainment to children, women, and the lower classes...
