Magic Realism: A Problem :: Essays Papers

Magic pragmatism A ProblemMagic Realism is a term employ by critics to describe a mingling of the mundane with the fantastic. This may search a straightforward enough approach unless adept happens to be a student of postcolonial studies - or at least, a student of postcolonialism should smell a rat. A brief history of the term is required for us to affect why the term should be deemed problematical. In 1925 Franz Roh, a German fraud critic, used the term to describe a new post-expressionistic form that was emerging. infixedly the art described as magic realism was realist but was at the same time possessed of a strange or dreamlike quality. If one were to assay a literary analog - although it is probably better if one did not - the paintings were a non-verbal equivalent of defamiliarization. Essentially, the magic was derived from the painting technique employed by the associated artists rather than the actual content (ultimately it came to be viewed as a assortment of dow n-market surrealism). Later, in 1955, Angel Flores applied the term (with some modification - he referred to it as magical realism) to Spanish-American writing. Flores put forward Borges as the professional person of this form and suggested Kafka as a Eurpoean equivalent. In this caase magic realism was grand by the fact that its practitioners treated the fantastic as normal, without any genius of surprise or amazement. In summary one could say - clean tritely - that Flores version of magic realism was Dickens with weirdness nineteenth century realism dotted with fantastical moments beyond spontaneous gracious combustion. Gradually Flores definition was expanded, yet simultaneously narrowed to implicate folkloric elements. However, this is an over-simplification of the human face - these elements came to be regarded as essential. With folklore being considered an integral part of the genre, Borges could no long-lasting be considered a magic realist (instead he could only be considered as part of fantastic literature - although he is now regarded as an essential if early cog in postmodernisms wheel). Perhaps the novel most commonly described as magic realist is Gabriel Garcia Marquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yet, if one takes the definition as being strictly one which must include folklore, this novel too is shifted into the realms of fantastic literature. Instead, a critic adhering to the term in this way would say that a Garcia Marquez novel such as memorial of a Death Foretold, or Love in the Time of Cholera, is a magic realist novel.