Do you believe in magic ?

1. Do you believe in magic? An Introduction to Magical Realism

2. What is realism? • Before we get into magical realism, let's talk about realism, the movement it was playing off of. • Realism began as an artistic movement in the 19th century around the work of visual artist Gustave Courbet. Before Courbet, artists of the Romantic period had produced work that idealized reality. Landscapes were more beautiful, emotions exaggerated, and bodies perfected. • After the 1848 revolution in France, artists began to reject this romanticization of life in favor of exact representations of reality. The poor were no longer cleaned up in paintings, and if the fruit in the painters basket rotted on the table, it was shown rotting on the canvas. This movement grew with the invention of photography, because artists were able to look at reality in a split moment of time and base paintings off of that instead of posed models. In literary realism, authors began trying to represent contemporary lives as they were, a prime example being George Eliot's Middlemarch, becausethe characters speak in the vernacular of the day and Eliot details all of their activities, including the banal ones.

3. The Gleaners.A realist painting by Jean-Francois Millet.

4. What is Magical Realism? • Just as realism was a response to romanticism, magical realism was a reaction to realism. The term magical realism was introduced by Franz Roh, a German art critic in 1925. When Roh coined the term he meant it to create an art category that strayed from the strict guidelines of realism, but the term did not name an artistic movement until the 1940s in Latin America and the Caribbean. • Magical realism is most often used to describe the literary subgenre popularized by Latin American writers in the 1950s. Though every work of literature in this genre varies in its content and style, there are some characteristics that appear over and over again.

5. Characteristics of magic(al) realism: • The story must be set in a realistic environment with magical elements. • Part of the draw of magical realism is that it blurs the line between realistic fiction and fantasy by adding in elements like the presence of dead characters in Toni Morrison's Beloved, fluidity of time in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, and telepathy in Tea Obreht'sThe Tiger's Wife. • Unlike in fantasy novels, authors in the magical realism genre deliberately withhold information about the magic in their created world in order to present the magical events as ordinary occurrences, and to present the incredible as normal, every-day life.

6. Pat Murphy states, “In science fiction, if everyone is walking around with a talking monkey on his head, you need an explanation for it. In magic realism, everyone acts as if the monkeys have always been there.”

7. For example: • The following paragraph is from the very beginning of Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize winning novel, Beloved, which uses the techniques of magical realism to tell the story of Sethe and her family as they are haunted by a daughter that Sethe killed on her flight out of slavery.

8. "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old-as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door-sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, the months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once-the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time."

9. Magical Realism, Authors • Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Columbia, 1928 -2014 • Jorge Luis Borges – Argentina, 1899-1986 • Isabel Allende—Chile,. 1942-

10. Gabriel Garcia Marquez • He lived in Aracataca, Colombia, a banana town by the Caribbean. • His grandparents were his most important relatives, and influenced him and his writing later on.

11. Gabriel Garcia Marquez • His grandfather was a general, a hero and a great story teller. • His grandmother was very superstitious. She filled the house with stories of ghosts and premonitions.

12. Elements of Magical Realism • Transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal. • Examples: An angel is found in a mud puddle of the courtyard. The angel’s wings have parasites.

13. Elements of Magical Realism • Elements of dreams, fairy story, or mythology combine with the everyday. • Examples: Some townspeople thought the angel should be named mayor of the world or at least a 5-star general. A man couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him.

14. Elements of Magical Realism • The frame or surface of the work may be conventionally realistic. • Example: Townspeople, village, flood, chicken coop.

15. Elements of Magical Realism • Have a strong narrative drive. • Example: Wings are not the most important difference between a hawk and an airplane. They are even less important in recognizing an angel.