Magic(al) Realism Ann Bowers, Maggie
Magic(al) Realism,
2004, 20040802, 2004-08-02
eBook, Book Chapter
Bestselling novels by Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a multitude of others have enchanted us by blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. Their genre of writing has ...been variously defined as 'magic', 'magical' or 'marvellous' realism and is quickly becoming a core area of literary studies. This guide offers a first step for those wishing to consider this area in greater depth, by:
exploring the many definitions and terms used in relation to the genre
tracing the origins of the movement in painting and fiction
offering an historical overview of the contexts for magic(al) realism
providing analysis of key works of magic(al) realist fiction, film and art.
This is an essential guide for those interested in or studying one of today's most popular genres.
'Bower's overall purpose is "to guide the non-expert through the minefield of terms, to identify the origins of the terms and concepts in art, literature and film and to introduce readers to a range of innovative and engaging fictions". All of this she achieves: the text is easily understood without being simplistic, and the glossary, though short, is clear and very helpful.' British Bulletin of Publications
'What renders Bower's Magic(al) Realism such a valuable and comprehensive introduction is that in addition to literature, she also considers artefacts from other fields of cultural production ... Bower's analysis of magical realism also proves exceptional in that she repeatedly draws attention to the importance of the cultural location of the audience in receiving a work as magic realist.' - Wasafiri
Introduction 1. Origins of Magic(al) Realism 2. Delimiting the Terms 3. Locations of the Magic(al) Realism 4. Transgressive Variants of Magical Realism 5. Cross-cultural variants of Magical realism 6. Magic(al) Realism and Cultural Productions 7. The Future of Magic(al) Realism Glossary Bibliography Index
Maggie Ann Bowers teaches American and Canadian literature at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She has published numerous articles on contemporary American and Canadian authors, and is the co-editor of Convergences and Interferences (2002).
Magic realism is a disputed genre in world literature scholarship today. While many Latin American critics have advocated for its historical and geographical significance, others see it as an ...inherently postcolonial aesthetic formation, a worldwide literary trend, and even a global commodity. Indeed, since its emergence in the first half of the 20th century, magic realism has remained an attractive and active category, as new artworks are classified as such worldwide. To address these tensions, this essay engages with definitions, general information, and lists of authors and literary works classified as magic realists on Wikipedia. To do so, we compile a thorough database of all writers mentioned in Wikipedia’s entries for magic realism in fifty-six different languages. We visualize this data and close-read Wikipedia entries to understand better which writers are most often identified as magic realists, to which literary and linguistic traditions they belong, and how definitions of magic realism in different languages interact. We trace how the narrow and broad definitions of magic realism tend to both compete and overlap on Wikipedia. We argue that magic realism on Wikipedia can be better understood as a glocal phenomenon. In this sense, we reflect on what the worldliness of magic realism means in a non-academic context and ask how the broad circulation of magic realism can inform our understanding of world literature.
This paper aims to investigate the short story “The Lunatic’s Eclipse” by the Arab-American Randa Jarrar and explain the postmodern techniques represented through the different functions of the moon. ...The study is qualitative research that employs postmodern strategies of magic realism, metafiction, carnivalesque, and intertextuality as the study's methodology. Through these strategies, the story blurs the boundaries between reality, magic, and fiction and unites them in one entity to highlight themes of freedom, happiness, and self-reliance. Therefore, the study relies on postmodern theorists' ideas and theories on these strategies, including Jean-Francois Lyotard, Linda Hutcheon, Franz Koh, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gerard Genette, and William Gass. The moon is also employed as a structure for the story and a theme that unites all the parts of the story together. The characters are also given names that mean different phases of the moon in Arabic. Jarrar uses the moon to resist stereotyping Arab women as weak and submissive.
Genres of fantasy tales, inclusive of allegories, animal fables and fairy tales can provide cutting insight and clarity about the complexities of society and the intricacies of human nature. These ...fantasy tales may have both literal as well as symbolic meanings. However, the characters here are often animals and plants that can talk and behave like human beings. This genre of storytelling exists in virtually every culture of the world. These stories have elements of fantasy and magic that are appealing to children. However, while the magical elements in traditional fairy tales are used for the purpose of creating delight and suspense in the imaginative minds of children, other types of fantasy tales can typically have a symbolic meaning attached to them. As a result, we find the terms allegories, fables and fairy tales used quite interchangeably while talking about fantasy tales.
Exploring Jewish resistance in relation to the Holocaust has become one major topic widely discussed in the Holocaust novels written by the second or third generations of Holocaust survivors. The ...fact that these writers primarily have no direct experience with the event somewhat shows that the paramount effects of the tragedy expand generations and leave trauma that lingers. To cope with the narration of atrocities, resistance strategy is often employed by the Holocaust writers and to a certain point has a function to represent the struggle of the survivors. Joseph Skibell as the third-generation writer deploys a strategy of spatial movement as a coping mechanism and resistance against atrocities in his magical realist novel A Blessing on the Moon. Using Sara Upstone s spatial politics perspective, this research aims to investigate the spatial movement performed by the main character and to explain how it produces the resistance strategy. In doing so, it will also further examine the scale and characteristics of various spatial locations used in the novel as a means of resistance. As it goes along, the issue of trauma and identity of the Holocaust survivors and their descendants is also explained.
The article describes the traditions of magical realism in M. Shishkin's Letter Book and N. Abgaryan's Simon. The research involved comparative, mytho-poetic, hermeneutic, formal, and structural ...methods. V. I. Tyupa's theory of artistic discourse and F. Schlegel's idea of irony served as the basic theory in identifying the motifs associated with magical realism and generated by the ironic type of artistic completion. The term of magical realism covers works that belong to very different literary movements. The authors used the ironic type of aesthetic completion to explain similar elements in different poetics of magical realism fiction. The traditions of magical realism in the twentieth-century fiction revealed the following features: an ironic type of artistic integrity; dual worlds and miracles; fantasy intertwined with reality; myths, traditions, and legends; archetypes (father, savior, eternal lover, etc.) and symbols (tree, sea, etc.); unmotivated fantasy; fantastical timeline with no clear boundaries between the past and the future; a highly rhythmical pattern, etc.
Historically, the presentation of collective trauma has been fraught with moral and aesthetic contradictions. Hollywood, in particular, has long struggled to visually adapt national trauma into a ...collective whole without rendering it into a spectacle; moreso when it comes to non-Western narratives. Given the indispensability of magic realism in the history of Latin America, it stands to reason that a culture that is so steeped in alternative ways of storytelling would employ such techniques in its national cinema. In light of the sudden boom in the popularity of Latin American cinema, this paper attempts to look at how Guillermo del Toro’s El Laberinto del Fauno incorporates elements of magic realism in the fabric of its narrative in order to speak of the collective trauma of the Spanish Civil War.
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