Definition of Magic Realism in Fiction Writing

Definition of Magic Realism in Fiction WritingDefinition of Magic Realism in Fiction WritingThe term magic realism describes contemporary fiction, usually associated with Latin America, whose narrative blends magical or fantastical elements with reality. Magic realist writers include Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Isabel Allende. First Use The term was coined first by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925, but it was Alejo Carpentier who gave the term its current definition, in the prolog to his book El Reino de Este Mundo. The marvelous, he writes, in a translated version, begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality, an unaccustomed insight that is singularly favored by the unexpected richness of reality or an amplification of the scale and categories or reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an berregung of the spirit that leads it to a kind of ex treme state estado lmite. Gullivers Travels As the poet Dana Gioia reminds us in his article, Gabriel Garca Mrquez and Magic Realism, the narrative strategy we know as magic realism long predates the term One already sees the key elements of Magic Realism in Gullivers Travels (1726) ...Likewise Nikolai Gogols short story, The Nose (1842) ... fulfills virtually every requirement of this purportedly contemporary style. One finds similar precedents in Dickens, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Maupassant, Kafka, Bulgakov, Calvino, Cheever, Singer, and others. But Carpentiers intention was to differentiate lo real Maravilloso americano from the European surrealist movement. In his mind, the fantastic in Latin America was not achieved by transcending reality, but was inherent in the Latin American experience of reality After all, what is the entire history of America if not a chronicle of the marvelous real?