A Collection of Essays for college courses such as: Magical Realism in Latin America. Spanish-American Fiction: XXth Century; Special Topics: Jorge Luis Borges and Sex and Magic in Latin American Literature. The term "magic realism" or "magical realism" has been bruited about with great frequency in the last half of the twentieth century, especially in reference to contemporary Latin American literature, yet it is not always clear exactly what is meant by this designation. In his introduction to this outstanding collection of essays, Dr. Clark Zlotchew attempts to elucidate the meaning and scope of the term by providing a historical overview of it, defining the literary modes often confused with it and offering some current opinions on what a definition of "magic realism" should or might be. The ten essays that follow present an analysis of works by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Ricci, Antonio Brailovsky and Enrique Jaramillo Levi, in an attempt to illustrate the manner in which some Latin American authors create their own brand of "magic realism".

In the beginning of time there were three elements that made up our beautiful world, the moon, the stars, and the sun. These three magical rays of light were governed by three goddesses: Moonlight, Starbright, and Sunbeam. They kept all three elements moving in time and space so that there would be life on earth. Moonlight balanced the moon on her feet while keeping it aligned with the sun, Sunbeam held the sun over her head while absorbing its hot temperatures, and Starbright tasseled each star to its perfect position to guide those lost. These three goddesses kept everything aligned and balanced within our universe.

On magical realism in literature

Magical realism can lay claim to being one of most recognizable genres of prose writing. It mingles the probable and improbable, the real and the fantastic, and it provided the late-twentieth century novel with an infusion of creative energy in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and beyond. Writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, and many others harnessed the resources of narrative realism to the representation of folklore, belief, and fantasy. This book sheds new light on magical realism, exploring in detail its global origins and development. It offers new perspectives of the history of the ideas behind this literary tradition, including magic, realism, otherness, primitivism, ethnography, indigeneity, and space and time.

This book follows the hybrid and contradictory history of magic realism through the writings of three key figures – art historian Franz Roh, novelist Alejo Carpentier, and cultural critic Fredric Jameson – drawing links between their political, aesthetic, and philosophical ideas on art’s relationship to reality. Magic realism is vast in scope, spanning almost a century, and is often confused with neighbouring styles of literature or art, most notably surrealism. The fascinating conditions of modernist Europe are complex and contradictory, a spirit that magic realism has taken on as it travels far and wide. The filmmakers and writers in this book acknowledge the importance of feeling, atmosphere, and mood to subtly provoke and resist global capitalism. Theirs is the history of magic-realist cinema. The book explores this history through the modernist avant-garde in search of a new theory of cinematic magic realism. It uncovers a resistant, geopolitical form of world cinema – moving from Europe, through Latin America and the former Soviet Union, to Thailand – that emerges from these ideas. This book is invaluable to any reader interested in world modernism(s) in relation to contemporary cinema and geopolitics. Its sustained analysis of film as a sensory, intermedial medium is of interest to scholars working across the visual arts, literature, critical theory, and film-philosophy.

In these conversations with a friend and contemporary the Nobel prize-winning Colombian novelist speaks movingly, revealingly and unaffectedly about his family background, his early travels and struggles as a writer, his literary antecedents and his personal artistic concerns. Guided by Mendoza, Maacute;rquez reveals - as transfigured in his work by the power of language - the heat and colour of the Spanish Caribbean, the mythological world of its inhabitants, the exotic mentality of its leaders.

Since the 1930s, Latin American writers have used magic realism to transcend the limits of the fantastic and illuminate social problems within the culture. The author considers five modern Latin American novels. Starting with two canonical texts of magic realism, Alejo Carpentier's El reino de este mundo (1949) and Garcia Marquez's Cien a-os de soledad (1967), the author argues that Los Sangurimas (1934), by the Ecuadorian Jos de la Cuadra, is a seminal work due to de la Cuadra's new approach to reality and his use of marvelous and hyperbolic elements. The author shows the continuation of this example in Ecuador in Demetrio Aguilera-Malta's Siete lunas y siete serpientes (1970) and Alicia Y nez Coss'o's Bruna, soroche y los tios (1972), which elucidate social problems of race, class, and gender through use of magic realism. In selecting for her study well-known writers such as Carpentier, Garcia Marquez, and others, less well-known such as de la Cuadra, Aguilera-Malta and Y nez Coss'o, the author demonstrates that both canonical and noncanonical writers for many years have been working on this new way of writing to interpret in fiction the highly complex Latin American reality.