![]() Critics frustrated by their inability to pin down the term's meaning have, in disgust, urged its complete abandonment. ![]() ![]() Something that for lack of a better word could be called magical realism." When academic critics attempted to define magical realism with scholarly exactitude, they discovered that it was more powerful than precise. A poetic divination or denial of reality. It is worth noting that Arturo Uslar-Pietri, in presenting his term for this literary tendency, always kept its definition open by means of a language more lyrical and evocative than strictly critical, as in this 1948 statement: "What came to dominate the story and to leave a lasting impression was the view of man as a mystery surrounded by realistic data. Though the tellers of astonishing tales, they themselves expressed little or no surprise. A secondary trait was the characteristic attitude of narrators toward the subject matter: they frequently appeared to accept events contrary to the usual operating laws of the universe as natural, even unremarkable. In the broadest terms, the phenomenon that seemed to be spreading through a sector of Spanish American writing was the co-occurrence of realism with fantastic, mythic, and magical. By the 1960s this phrase was being taken up not only by critics but by ordinary readers for whom it summarized a quality they had been noticing in recent fiction. It was Arturo Uslar-Pietri who applied to Latin American writing a term taken from German art criticism, magical realism. The Venezuelan essayist and fiction writer Arturo Uslar-Pietri was especially eager to promote this literary mixture as an exceptional feature of Latin American literature. (3) an implicit criticism of society, particularly the elite. (2) an examination of the character of human existence and (1) lyrical and, at times, fantastic writing with It is characterized by an equal acceptance of the ordinary and the extraordinary. "(Magical Realism is a) narrative technique that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality. Naomi Lindstrom, Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction (1994):
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