Magical realism
[5] The term magic realism is broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous, and Matthew Strecher (1999) defines it as "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.
All these writers have lived through great historical convulsions and wrenching personal upheavals, which they feel cannot be adequately represented in a discourse of undisturbed realism", citing Kundera's 1979 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as an exemplar.
"[13] Michiko Kakutani writes that "The transactions between the extraordinary and the mundane that occur in so much Latin American fiction are not merely a literary technique, but also a mirror of a reality in which the fantastic is frequently part of everyday life.
In English literature, its chief exponents include Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, Alice Hoffman, Louis De Bernieres, Nick Joaquin, and Nicola Barker.
In Bengali literature, prominent writers of magic realism include Nabarun Bhattacharya, Akhteruzzaman Elias, Shahidul Zahir, Jibanananda Das and Syed Waliullah.
[2]: 9–11 [15]: 33 Roh identified magic realism's accurate detail, smooth photographic clarity, and portrayal of the 'magical' nature of the rational world; it reflected the uncanniness of people and our modern technological environment.
Reading his fairy tales, you understand that Hoffmann is, in essence, a kind, clear person, because he could tell a child such things as The Nutcracker or The Royal Bride – these pearls of human fantasy.
[19]German magic-realist paintings influenced the Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli, who has been called the first to apply magic realism to writing, aiming to capture the fantastic, mysterious nature of reality.
[2]: 14 Maggie Ann Bowers writes that marvelous-realist literature and art expresses "the seemingly opposed perspectives of a pragmatic, practical and tangible approach to reality and an acceptance of magic and superstition" within an environment of differing cultures.
Rather than follow Carpentier's developing versions of "the (Latin) American marvelous real", Uslar Pietri's writings emphasize "the mystery of human living amongst the reality of life".
[23]: 107 Magical realism plot lines characteristically employ hybrid multiple planes of reality that take place in "inharmonious arenas of such opposites as urban and rural, and Western and indigenous".
[36][37] For example, when reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, the reader must let go of pre-existing ties to conventional exposition, plot advancement, linear time structure, scientific reason, etc., to strive for a state of heightened awareness of life's connectedness or hidden meanings in order for the book to begin to make sense.
It deals with what Naipaul has called "half-made" societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new, in which public corruptions and private anguishes are somehow more garish and extreme than they ever get in the so-called "North", where centuries of wealth and power have formed thick layers over the surface of what's really going on.
Maggie Bowers claims he is widely acknowledged as the originator of Latin American magical realism (as both a novelist and critic);[2] she describes Carpentier's conception as a kind of heightened reality where elements of the miraculous can appear while seeming natural and unforced.
She suggests that by disassociating himself and his writings from Roh's painterly magic realism, Carpentier aimed to show how—by virtue of Latin America's varied history, geography, demography, politics, myths, and beliefs—improbable and marvelous things are made possible.
[34] On that note, Lee A. Daniel categorizes critics of Carpentier into three groups: those that do not consider him a magical realist whatsoever (Ángel Flores), those that call him "a mágicorealista writer with no mention of his 'lo real maravilloso' (Gómez Gil, Jean Franco, Carlos Fuentes)", and those that use the two terms interchangeably (Fernando Alegria, Luis Leal, Emir Rodriguez Monegal).
[52] A list has been compiled of characteristics one might typically attribute to postmodernism, but that also could describe literary magic realism: "self-reflexiveness, metafiction, eclecticism, redundancy, multiplicity, discontinuity, intertextuality, parody, the dissolution of character and narrative instance, the erasure of boundaries, and the destabilization of the reader".
"[2]: 22 Literary theorist Kornelije Kvas wrote that "what is created in magic(al) realism works is a fictional world close to reality, marked by a strong presence of the unusual and the fantastic, in order to point out, among other things, the contradictions and shortcomings of society.
There is a strong historical connection between Franz Roh's concept of magic realism and surrealism, as well as the resulting influence on Carpentier's marvelous reality; however, important differences remain.
Surrealism "is most distanced from magical realism [in that] the aspects that it explores are associated not with material reality but with the imagination and the mind, and in particular it attempts to express the 'inner life' and psychology of humans through art".
Though often used to refer to works of magical realism, fabulism incorporates fantasy elements into reality, using myths and fables to critique the exterior world and offer direct allegorical interpretations.
Fabulism helped to work through these complexities and, in the words of Bettelheim, "make physical what is otherwise ephemeral or ineffable in an attempt ... of understanding those things that we struggle the most to talk about: loss, love, transition.
Gussow defined "The New Fabulism" as "taking ancient myths and turn(ing) them into morality tales",[63] In Ed Menta's book, The Magic Behind the Curtain, he explores Şerban's work and influence within the context of American theatre.
Within the Latin American world, the most iconic of magical realist writers are Jorge Luis Borges,[71] Isabel Allende,[72] and Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez, whose novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was an instant worldwide success.
[2] Morrison's most notable work, Beloved, tells the story of a mother who, haunted by the ghost of her child, learns to cope with memories of her traumatic childhood as an abused slave and the burden of nurturing children into a harsh and brutal society.
Dimitris Lyacos's Poena Damni trilogy, originally written in Greek, is also seen as displaying characteristics of magic realism in its simultaneous fusion of real and unreal situations in the same narrative context.
Mookajjiya Kanasugalu is a novel that traces the evolution of 'gods' in a grounded setting via Mookajji's (the main character) preternatural ability to touch and see everything an inanimate object has witnessed in its entire existence.
[15]: 60 New Objectivity saw an utter rejection of the preceding impressionist and expressionist movements, and Hartlaub curated his exhibition under the guideline: only those "who have remained true or have returned to a positive, palpable reality in order to reveal the truth of the times"[78]: 41 would be included.
One, conservative towards Classicism, taking roots in timelessness, wanting to sanctify again the healthy, physically plastic in pure drawing after nature ... after so much eccentricity and chaos [a reference to the repercussions of World War I] ...
The other, the left, glaringly contemporary, far less artistically faithful, rather born of the negation of art, seeking to expose the chaos, the true face of our time, with an addiction to primitive fact-finding and nervous baring of the self ...
