Magical Realism and Latin America
Novels and short stories, especially by Latin American writers, use a combination of realism and fantasy. This genre is known as magical realism. An example of magical realism can be found in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Gabriel Garcia Marquez there uses food in the form of a cocoa drink to connect nature and the magical, as when a priest lifts up off the ground and levitates after drinking a cup of cocoa: “he wiped his lips from a handkerchief that he drew from his sleeve, extended his arms, and closed his eyes. Thereupon Father Nicanor rose six inches above the level of the ground.”7
The unit will include the works “My Life with the Wave” by Octavio Paz, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Hombres de Maíz (Men of Maize) by Miguel Ángel Asturias. Magical realism is the convergence of magic with reality. Maggie Ann Bowers defines magical realism in terms of “its distinguishing feature from literary realism”: “it fuses the two opposing aspects of the oxymoron (the magical and the realist) together to form one new perspective. Because it breaks down the distinction between the usually opposing terms of the magical and the realist, magical realism is often considered to be a disruptive mode.”8
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