A World of Magical Realism

Catalog description

First created as a term applied narrowly to European visual arts, Magical Realism as a genre gained literary prominence in the hands of Latin American authors, most famously Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, whose novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad, 1967) is still regarded as the apotheosis of the genre and, in my opinion, one of the best novels ever written by anybody ever. This course, however, will demonstrate a broader extent of this genre’s appeal, as it continues to wield a great deal of influence on the imaginations of authors worldwide who have found their way to magical realism as they attempt to depict states of reality that do not, or rather cannot, fit within conventional understandings of what real is.