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July 23, 2006
Magical Realism
It's come to my attention that the style of literature I enjoy the most is known as "magical realism." Here's a description excerpted from an Emory student's site:
...magical realism aims to seize the paradox of the union of opposites. For instance, it challenges polar opposites like life and death and the pre-colonial past versus the post-industrial present. Magical realism is characterized by two conflicting perspectives, one based on a rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality. Magical realism differs from pure fantasy primarily because it is set in a normal, modern world with authentic descriptions of humans and society. According to Angel Flores, magical realism involves the fusion of the real and the fantastic, or as he claims, "an amalgamation of realism and fantasy".
There is debate in the literary community as to whether magical realism is reserved for Latin American literature or other cultures which have a strong background of magical/tribal legend and magic. However, over the course of my research into the "genre" or qualities of magical realism, I've found a solid amount of scholars who maintain that magical realism isn't limited to any specific culture - and that writers from other cultures (like Salman Rushdie or Angela Carter or Milan Kundera) are equally serious and valid authors of magical realism. Another description of magical realism states,
Magic Realist novelists embroider fantastic elements of fable, folklore, and myth -- symbolic indictments of the crazy-quilt insanity of contemporary politics and normalizing ideologies -- then stitch them seamlessly into a conventional narrative. This conscious, playful interweaving of the surreal and the magical within the traditional adult novel confronts the repression of thought-policed cultures and the oppression of modern aesthetics, both of which deny the power of the imaginative world.
Thus, here are some I've read and enjoyed. As I read more, I'll add to the list... and perhaps pop up some reviews as well.
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
• The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Wise Children by Angela Carter
• Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter
• Blindness by Jose Saramago
• Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
• We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Immortality by Milan Kundera
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
• Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
• The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea
• The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
Posted by researchgirl at July 23, 2006 11:58 AM