Magical Realism in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Ana Castillo's So Far from God

Magical Realism in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Ana Castillo's So Far from God PDF Author: Jasmina Murad
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640319370
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 61

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Free University of Berlin (John-F.-Kennedy-Institute), course: The Subaltern Speaks: Minority Literature in the U.S., 17 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In this paper I focus on two considerable U.S. authors: Toni Morrison and Ana Castillo. The fact that these writers - who do not share the same ethnic background - both deploy the literary mode of magical realism in their works has engaged my interest to analyze and compare their novels Beloved and So Far from God. The purpose of this paper is not only to probe into the nature of magical realism in the two novels, but also to examine this narrative form as a socio-cultural practice which is connected to a special Weltanschauung. To enter this vast territory, it will be useful to situate the term magical realism in a theoretical and cultural framework which happens in the following chapter. Subsequently, I will expose how Morrison and Castillo employ magical realism in Beloved and So Far from God, and, in particular, I try to identify its function and the role it plays in terms of Morrison′s and Castillo′s cultural and historical background. In the conclusion I will expose the parallels which can be drawn between the novels, coming up with the thesis that for these parallels, there are two underlying main functions of magical realism.

Magical Realism in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Ana Castillo's So Far from God

Magical Realism in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Ana Castillo's So Far from God PDF Author: Jasmina Murad
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640319370
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 61

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Free University of Berlin (John-F.-Kennedy-Institute), course: The Subaltern Speaks: Minority Literature in the U.S., 17 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In this paper I focus on two considerable U.S. authors: Toni Morrison and Ana Castillo. The fact that these writers - who do not share the same ethnic background - both deploy the literary mode of magical realism in their works has engaged my interest to analyze and compare their novels Beloved and So Far from God. The purpose of this paper is not only to probe into the nature of magical realism in the two novels, but also to examine this narrative form as a socio-cultural practice which is connected to a special Weltanschauung. To enter this vast territory, it will be useful to situate the term magical realism in a theoretical and cultural framework which happens in the following chapter. Subsequently, I will expose how Morrison and Castillo employ magical realism in Beloved and So Far from God, and, in particular, I try to identify its function and the role it plays in terms of Morrison′s and Castillo′s cultural and historical background. In the conclusion I will expose the parallels which can be drawn between the novels, coming up with the thesis that for these parallels, there are two underlying main functions of magical realism.

Moments of Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures

Moments of Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures PDF Author: Lyn Di Iorio Sandín
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137329246
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
A collection of essays that explores magical realism as a momentary interruption of realism in US ethnic literature, showing how these moments of magic realism serve to memorialize, address, and redress traumatic ethnic histories.

So Far From God

So Far From God PDF Author: Ana Castillo
Publisher: WW Norton
ISBN: 0393326934
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
"A delightful novel...impossible to resist." —Barbara Kingsolver, Los Angeles Times Book Review Sofia and her fated daughters, Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, and la Loca, endure hardship and enjoy love in the sleepy New Mexico hamlet of Tome, a town teeming with marvels where the comic and the horrific, the real and the supernatural, reside.

Traumatic Experience and Repressed Memory in Magical Realist Novels

Traumatic Experience and Repressed Memory in Magical Realist Novels PDF Author: Md Abu Shahid Abdullah
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527547884
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
This book explores the close association between the literary representation of historical trauma and the alternative narrative form of magical realism, underscoring the role of memory, empathy and imagination. It discusses the potential of magical realism to give a literary representation to individual and collective trauma arising from the Holocaust, slavery, and apartheid, and to turn those unspoken memories into narratives. It also analyses the role of magical realism in depicting trauma suffered by female victims during and following those events. Again, by dealing with the above-mentioned events, their specific historical context and universal meaning for humankind, this book highlights a universal experience of trauma.

Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory

Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory PDF Author: David Herman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134458398
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1327

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Book Description
The past several decades have seen an explosion of interest in narrative, with this multifaceted object of inquiry becoming a central concern in a wide range of disciplinary fields and research contexts. As accounts of what happened to particular people in particular circumstances and with specific consequences, stories have come to be viewed as a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change. However, the very predominance of narrative as a focus of interest across multiple disciplines makes it imperative for scholars, teachers, and students to have access to a comprehensive reference resource.

Liminality and the Short Story

Liminality and the Short Story PDF Author: Jochen Achilles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131781245X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This book is a study of the short story, one of the widest taught genres in English literature, from an innovative methodological perspective. Both liminality and the short story are well-researched phenomena, but the combination of both is not frequent. This book discusses the relevance of the concept of liminality for the short story genre and for short story cycles, emphasizing theoretical perspectives, methodological relevance and applicability. Liminality as a concept of demarcation and mediation between different processual stages, spatial complexes, and inner states is of obvious importance in an age of global mobility, digital networking, and interethnic transnationality. Over the last decade, many symposia, exhibitions, art, and publications have been produced which thematize liminality, covering a wide range of disciplines including literary, geographical, psychological and ethnicity studies. Liminal structuring is an essential aspect of the aesthetic composition of short stories and the cultural messages they convey. On account of its very brevity and episodic structure, the generic liminality of the short story privileges the depiction of transitional situations and fleeting moments of crisis or decision. It also addresses the moral transgressions, heterotopic orders, and forms of ambivalent self-reflection negotiated within the short story's confines. This innovative collection focuses on both the liminality of the short story and on liminality in the short story.

Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas

Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas PDF Author: Shannin Schroeder
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Drawing from a variety of contemporary literature—including such works as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Beloved, and Like Water for Chocolate—Schroeder explores magical realism as one of many common denominators in the literature of the Americas, challenging the notion that magical realism should be defined merely in terms of geography or Latin American history. By relying on an all-encompassing vision of this unique mode of writing, the author argues that the Americas share a literary tradition and validates the North American strain of the mode. In addition, she points to fundamentally similar approaches to fiction that illustrate the ways in which the Americas share a common literature and calls for increased Pan-American scholarship. Counteracting the critical tendency to label anything unreal or supernatural in literature as magical realism, Schroeder traces the mode through a variety of contemporary works, including well-known and lesser-known examples. Through a carefully articulated history and description of the mode itself, she is able to show that while Latin American and North American fiction share in common certain features of magical realism, their distinctive approaches to it reflect Latin America's third-world concerns and North America's preoccupation with popular culture and capitalism. Tracing the forces of change at work on the mode in an effort to counter the tendency among scholars to apply the label without justification, this book reclaims magical realism as a current and significant term for use in its application to literary works.

Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries PDF Author: Timo Müller
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110422425
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
Increasing specialization within the discipline of English and American Studies has shifted the focus of scholarly discussion toward theoretical reflection and cultural contexts. These developments have benefitted the discipline in more ways than one, but they have also resulted in a certain neglect of close reading. As a result, students and researchers interested in such material are forced to turn to scholarship from the 1960s and 1970s, much of which relies on dated methodological and ideological presuppositions. The handbook aims to fill this gap by providing new readings of texts that figure prominently in the literature classroom and in scholarly debate − from James’s The Ambassadors to McCarthy’s The Road. These readings do not revert naively to a time “before theory.” Instead, they distil the insights of literary and cultural theory into concise introductions to the historical background, the themes, the formal strategies, and the reception of influential literary texts, and they do so in a jargon-free language accessible to readers on all levels of qualification.

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description


Magical Realism and Literature

Magical Realism and Literature PDF Author: Christopher Warnes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108621759
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 736

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Book Description
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.