magic realism

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magic realism, a term coined by Franz Roh (1925), to describe tendencies in the work of certain German artists of the neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity), characterized by clear, cool, static, thinly-painted, sharp-focus images, frequently portraying the imaginary, the improbable, or the fantastic in a realistic or rational manner. The term was adopted in the United States with the 1943 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art, entitled ‘American Realists and Magic Realists’. The term has subsequently been used to describe the works of such Latin American authors as Borges, García Márquez, and Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980), and elements of it have been noted in Günter Grass (1927– ), Italo Calvino (1923–85), Fowles, and other European writers. In the 1970s and 1980s it was adopted in Britain by several of the most original of younger fiction writers, including, notably, Emma Tennant (Hotel de Dream, 1976; Wild Nights, 1979); Angela Carter (The In-fernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, 1972; the remarkable Nights at the Circus, 1984); and Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children, 1981; Shame, 1983). Magic realist novels and stories have, typically, a strong narrative drive, in which the recognizably realistic mingles with the unexpected and the inexplicable, and in which elements of dream, fairy story, or mythology combine with the everyday, often in a mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence. English Magic Realism also has some affinity with the neo-Gothic.

Magic Realism (Magical Realism). Term coined by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe the aspect of Neue Sachlichkeit characterized by sharp-focus detail. In the book in which he originated the term—Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus, Probleme der neuesten Europäischen Malerie (1925)—Roh also included a rather mixed bag of non-German painters as ‘Magic Realists’, among them Miró and Picasso. Subsequently critics have used the term to cover various types of painting in which objects are depicted with photographic naturalism but which because of paradoxical elements or strange juxtapositions convey a feeling of unreality, infusing the ordinary with a sense of mystery. The paintings of Magritte are a prime example. In the English-speaking world the term gained currency with an exhibition entitled ‘American Realists and Magic Realists’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1943. The director of the museum, Alfred H. Barr, wrote that the term was ‘sometimes applied to the work of painters who by means of an exact realistic technique try to make plausible and convincing their improbable, dreamlike or fantastic visions’.

The term has been adopted in the field of literary criticism to describe ‘a kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical events are included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the “reliable” tone of objective realistic report’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 1990).

Magic(al) Realism. Term coined by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe the aspect of Neue Sachlichkeit characterized by sharp-focus detail. In the book in which he originated the term—Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus, Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerie (1925)—Roh also included a rather mixed bag of non-German painters as ‘Magic Realists', among them Miró, Picasso, and Severini. Subsequently critics have used the term to cover various types of painting in which objects are depicted with photographic naturalism but which because of paradoxical elements or strange juxtapositions convey a feeling of unreality, infusing the ordinary with a sense of mystery. The paintings of Magritte are a prime example.

In the English-speaking world the term gained currency with an exhibition entitled ‘American Realists and Magic Realists’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1943. The organizer of the exhibition, Alfred H. Barr, wrote that the term was ‘sometimes applied to the work of painters who by means of an exact realistic technique try to make plausible and convincing their improbable, dreamlike or fantastic visions'.

The term has been adopted in literary criticism to describe ‘a kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical events are included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the “reliable” tone of objective realistic report’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 1990).

Magic(al) Realism Term coined by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe the aspect of Neue Sachlichkeit characterized by sharp-focus detail. In the book in which he originated the term—Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus, Probleme der neuesten Europäischen Malerie (Leipzig, 1925)—Roh also included a rather mixed bag of non-German painters as ‘Magic Realists’, among them Miró and Picasso. Subsequently critics have used the term to cover various types of painting in which objects are depicted with photographic naturalism but which, because of paradoxical elements or strange juxtapositions, convey a feeling of unreality, infusing the ordinary with a sense of mystery. The paintings of Magritte are a prime example. In the English-speaking world the term gained currency with an exhibition entitled ‘American Realists and Magic Realists’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1943. The director of the museum, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., wrote that the term was ‘sometimes applied to the work of painters who by means of an exact realistic technique try to make plausible and convincing their improbable, dreamlike or fantastic visions’.

magic realism Twentieth-century literary form, particularly associated with post-1945 Latin American novelists. Interweaving of realistic and fantastical elements characterizes magic realism. Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is a classic example of the genre.