In magical realism the intention is to combine opposites. This makes the fantastic elements of the story seem more realistic: the facts are narrated as if they could really happen. In magical realism literature the most fantastic and reckless things are told in a very practical way.Įverything is described as if it were ordinary situations in real life. It has also been an important branch of postmodernism Franz Kafka (author of Metamorphosis ) is considered a precursor of the genre, although for its time the term magical realism was not yet used. In fact, writers from all over the world have adopted and adapted magical realism, adapting it to their own cultures and within their own frame of reference.įor example, in American and British literature magical realism has been a popular genre since the 1960s. ![]() While the Hispanic writers were, and continue to be, a great influence in the modern realistic magical literature, the style is not limited to a specific time or place. With their contribution, they helped to give a new focus to women's problems and to the perceptions of their reality. Later, writers such as Isabel Allende (Chile) and Laura Esquivel (Mexico) became part of the later developments of this narrative style. Then, the movement became an international phenomenon. ![]() Then, in 1970, the English version of the One hundred years of loneliness by Gabriel García Márquez. Subsequently, other writers from Latin America, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar, also used elements of magic and fantasy in their works. Influenced by this, in the 1950s several Latin American authors adopted the style, and combined it with French surrealist concepts and with folklore. In 1949 Alejo Carpentier wrote an essay on this subject. Like its counterpart in painting, the frame of reference for this style of writing was the exotic natural environment, the native cultures and the tumultuous political histories. These writers combined Roh's original theories of magical realism with French surrealist concepts of the marvelous and their own indigenous mythologies. In itself, Latin American magical-realistic literature originated with two novels: Corn men, by the Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias, and The kingdom of this world, of the Cuban Alejo Carpentier. There he adapted to the field of literature and was popularized by Latin American authors. He used it to describe a style of painting of his time that represented pictorially the enigmas of reality.Ī few years later, in the 1940s, the concept crossed the ocean to South America. The term magical realism was coined for the first time in 1925 by Franz Roh, a German art critic. 2.6 Political criticism as background material.2.4 The novel and short stories as preferred categories. ![]() 1.3 Magical realism in the rest of the world.Some terms that have been used to describe the magical realistic writing in different parts of the world are: crazy realism, fabulism, interstitial writing, unrealism, the marvelous real, magicorealism, the wonderful reality, McOndo, mystic realism, mythical realism, new wave, postmodern writing, realistic magicism, slipstream and social realism. It is a combination of rational elements of a European civilization and irrational elements of a primitive America. Now, there is a coincidence that magical realism is an expression of the reality of the New World. However, the fictional world is not separate from reality either. On the other hand, some critics maintain that it offers a vision of the world that is not based on natural or physical laws, nor on objective reality. ![]() The presence of the supernatural in magical realism is opposed to European rationality, amalgamating realism and fantasy. Thus, this narrative strategy implies the fusion of the real and the fantastic. Its objective is to take advantage of the paradox of the union of opposites then, it challenges binary oppositions such as life and death, or the precolonial past against the post-industrial present. His descriptions of humans and society in general are authentic. Julio Cortázar, representative of magical realism
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |