"My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic"
Gabriel García Márquez (1)
Year after year I seek new approaches to inculcate respect and the ability to value global consciousness and cultural diversity to my students as well as to stimulate them to learn about the Hispanic and Spanish cultures while learning the grammar, vocabulary and other linguistic components of the Spanish language.
Students are not necessarily thrilled about learning a foreign language, so my task as a teacher is to make it engaging and appealing while they learn how to identify and absorb knowledge about the many different Spanish cultures and identities. Most of my high school students are exposed to other cultures daily, but choose not to take advantage of such an invaluable experience since they do not know how to deal with the unfamiliar. The unit El realismo mágico en el cine provides me with the opportunity to introduce my students to "Magical Realism" in Latin American Literature and some of its adaptations in film while implementing the "5Cs"—Cultures, Connections (among disciplines), Comparisons (between cultures), Communication, and Communities- that the National Standards of Foreign Language Learning promote. (2))
Most of my students have not yet been exposed to foreign authors or to any kind of film analysis and they find it difficult to interpret what they read or see. As for films, they only think in terms of whether they like them or not, they do not think of films as stories that do have an structure, characters and many other aspects such as the cinematography, the mise-en scéne (settings and sets), the sound, the image, etc. In this unit, students will first learn about Latin American literature, to ultimately be able appreciate, read, understand, analyze, and interpret short stories or novel excerpts written by authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, Isabel Allende or Laura Esquivel in order to compare them to some of their adaptations on the screen. They will also learn basic notions of film studies, as well as how to watch, interpret and analyze movies as making connections and comparisons with the original text, decide the point of view of a text or film, who the narrator is, etc.
The unit is to be taught at Hill Regional Career High School in New Haven. Career, is magnet school for students interested in health sciences, business, and technology. The school has a student body of about 700 students of which approximately, a 53% are African American, 27% Hispanic, 17% White, 3% Asian. About 67% of the students receive reduced lunch.
I will use this unit with my Spanish 4 students, who have an Intermediate Level on the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Performance Guidelines for K-12. (3) Since they are able to use advanced grammatical structures, we will be working in their proficiency in all four-language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Students will hone their higher order thinking skills as they learn to express complex opinions and analyze literature and film-in Spanish.
Most of the class activities for this unit will be conducted in Spanish, but English will be used when necessary. With proper modifications, the unit could also be taught in Spanish 3, Spanish 5 and in Advanced Placement Spanish Language and/or Advance Placement Spanish Literature.
The material will be covered throughout the third and part of the fourth marking periods in about 15 sessions, each of which will be eighty minutes in length; these long periods will allow me to implement complex strategies and a variety of activities without many interruptions.
Rationale
Realismo mágico (Magic Realism)
Many are the definitions and explanations of what magic (or magical) realism is, and few of them are accurate. Probably because when academic critics tried to define the term with rigor, they realized it is powerful, but not precise. Some critics have applied the term to any example of the unreal or the fantastic in literature, leaving behind such intrinsic features as its regionality, cultural and political circumstances, as well as its historical contradictions.
The term "magic realism" as such was initially used in 1925 by the German art critic Franz Roh, to describe a group of post-expressionist painters that included Max Beckman and Otto Dix. The general tendency was to return to realism after expressionist extravagance. Unlike the literary term, magical realism in art describes paintings that do not include fantastic or magical features. It was not until 1949 that the label magic realism was narrative techniques used in Latin American literature.
Many Latin American writers - such as the Cuban Alejo Carpentier and Guatemalan Miguel ángel Asturias-, spent time in Paris experimenting with Surrealism during the 1920s and 1930s. They combined some of the Surrealist features with the realities of their continent. Surrealists tried to produce magical effects through artificial techniques: automatic writing, hypnosis and dreaming; meanwhile the magical realists portrayed the real world as having marvelous aspects inherent in it.
Alejo Carpentier criticized surrealists, his former friends, for juxtaposing objects that would never naturally be found together. He believed that magic realism is part of the natural heritage of Latin America because of its geographic, cultural and historic uniqueness. Gabriel García Márquez supports this view of magical realism as a technique particular to Central and South America, since this magic is part of the landscape and cannot be relocated: "poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable." (4)
Gabriel García Márquez agrees with Carpentier and suggests that magic realism is a part of the Latin American idiosyncrasy since it arises out of the Latin American experience, more as a result of political necessity than as a result of cultural instability.
The term was later on used by Venezuelan intellectual Arturo Uslar Pietri to describe the work of some Latin American writers. By the 1960s many critics and readers used it since fantastic, mythical and magical elements had become a common feature in Spanish American fiction by then. He also noted that the "magical realists" described the supernatural and magical elements naturally, accepting them with little or no surprise.
Naomi Lindstrom defines Magical Realism as a "narrative technique that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality." Characterized, she says "by an equal acceptance of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Magic realism fuses lyrical and, at times, fantastic writing with an examination of the character of human existence and an implicit criticism of society, particularly the elite." (5)
Another explanation of the term presents it as "fiction that does not distinguish between realistic and non-realistic events, fiction in which the supernatural, the mythical, or the implausible are assimilated to the cognitive structure of reality without a perceptive break in the narrator's or character's consciousness. Magical realism is a style associated with Latin American fiction especially in the 1960s and after." (6)
Some scholars state that there would be no reason to engage in magic realism if there were not a truth that cannot be revealed except through distortion. This is a key difference between magical realism and other kinds of fantastic trends; magic realism relies on a fusion of facts and fantasy in the service of a quest of meaning, instead of just relying on isolated fantastic episodes or elements. Magic realism combines fantasy with raw physical or social reality in a search for truth governing the surface of everyday life.
Writers look for supernatural phenomena in the natural world and in human actions and they often turn common places into mysterious happenings. Reality seems to be changed, but the reader still perceives essential truths as a result of this distortion.
García Marquez' novels help to define magic realism and illustrate how it works. In Cien años de soledad, a woman named Remedios the Beauty ascends to heaven grasping the bed sheets she had been folding in her hands. Such beauty, García Márquez suggests, cannot survive in this imperfect world of lust and greed. Remedios escapes her endless chain of male admirers by going to heaven, where her purity best belongs.
Some of the representative magic realists besides Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier are Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, Mexican Carlos Fuentes and Chileans José Donoso and Isabel Allende.
As mentioned before, extreme dramas of political experiences in Latin American countries prompt the authors to represent reality through distortion. Film is then a natural outgrowth of the necessity to bring this unique reality to the media. Adaptations, though, have a danger since sometimes it is not easy to express or put everything in a text into images, since there is no room left for imagination. Sometimes it is just a matter of having the economic goal instead of the artistic one as a priority.
Early on, filmmakers understood the potential of magical realism in their media, as for example, Federico Fellini, whose works in the 1950s and 1960s present qualities that would seem to be magical while still being realist.
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