The Theory, History, and Development of Magical Realism...

Magical realism is more a literary mode than a distinguishable genre and it aims to seize the paradox of the union of opposites such as time and timelessness, life and death, dream and reality and the pre-colonial past and the post-industrial present. It is characterized by two conflicting perspectives. While accepting the rational view of reality, it also considers the supernatural as a part of reality. The setting in a magical realist text is a normal world with authentic human characters. It is not at all fantastic or unreal; it is a mode of narration that discovers the natural in the supernatural and supernatural in the natural. It is a mode in which the real and the fantastic and the natural and the supernatural are more or less†¦show more content†¦During the 1940s and the 1950s, the term â€Å"magical realism† was used to describe the unusual realism by American painters such as Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker and some other artists. The major figure in the conceptual genealogy of magical realism in the context of literature is Massimo Bontempelli, the Italian writer and critic. In 1926, he specifically names that art as â€Å"magical realism† which proposes to find miracles in the midst of ordinary day to day life. Some works by Kafka, Junger and Musil are later named as magical realist texts, though they were not appreciated as such at the time of their first publication. Bontempelli exerts an influence over both Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Angel Asturias, the two authors credited with the earliest works of Latin American magical realism. Arturo Uslar-Pietri, the Venezuelan essayist and critic, applies the term â€Å"magical realism† to a very specific South American genre which is influenced by the blend of realism and fantasy as one comes across in Mario de Andrades influential novel Macunaima. In 1948 Pietri defines magical realism as a poetical negation of reality. He refers to â€Å"the depiction of man as an element of mystery surrounded by realistic data or a poetic intuition or denial of reality†.2 AlejoShow MoreRelatedEssay on Magical Realism1238 Words   |  5 PagesMagical Realism The idea of a genre of art that is called magical realism is less a trend than a tradition, an evolving genre that has its waxings and wanings, where each evolving form expresses an idea that may overlap another, yet at the same time branches off and creates something very different. What began in the visual arts has become a contemporary literary genre due to divergences. 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