Workshop/Research; Short Fiction from Brazil; Magical Realism & 100 Years of Solitude

Workshop/Research:

Period 1: This morning, please continue your workshopping (or writing drafts--see previous posts for ideas/prompts) or research your chosen country:

• Ecuador: Jesziah
• Venezuela: Jenna
• Guyana & French Guiana
• Suriname: Akhiyar
• Bolivia: Pahz
• Paraguay: Kyla
• Uruguay
• Panama: Alquasia
• Costa Rica
• Nicaragua
• Honduras: Joshua
• Guatemala: Isobel
• Trinadad & Tobago (islands): Raeona
• Belize: Turon

Use your research notes to create a voice-over script for a film project (documentary), podcast, or use the notes to write your speech for your live presentation (like a TedX talk)

• Misha Glenny Ted Talk Presentation Example/Model: Brazil (14 min.)

Period 2: (25 min.) Reading/Writing: Brazil short stories. From 8:20-8:45:

• Moacyr Scliar's "Agenda of Executive Jorge T. Flacks for Judgment Day"
• Prompt: create a "schedule" or "agenda" for an important event in the lives of your protagonist or for an entire nation/culture, etc. (Agenda for the day you die, agenda for your next life, agenda for what to do the day after graduation, agenda for the day humans achieve equality, agenda for the day sea life takes over humanity, agenda for the day all prisons are emptied, agenda for the day we are visited by aliens...etc.)
• Clarice Lispector's "The Fifth Story"
• Prompt: using metafiction techniques (see previous posts) write a story about the five (or pick a #) stories before this final one we are now reading...make sure, like Lispector's story to include details about the story and its title.

Choose at least one of these prompts and begin writing a story...

Period 2: (20 min.) Characteristics of Magical Realism:

Magical realism: an alteration of reality, often unexpected, that utilizes elements of fantasy (non-reality) reported in the journalistic or realistic style of objective storytelling. Magical realism achieves its power by weaving or blending together elements we tend to associate with Realism and elements we associate with the fabulous or fantastical. 

Magical realism can achieve its effects by either making marvelous or unfamiliar a certain character's perceptions (POV; often the narrator's reporting of plot events) and/or by making/describing the setting itself marvelous or fantastical.

Characteristics of magical realism include five primary traits:

1. An "irreducible" magic that cannot be explained by standard or accepted notions of natural law or physics.
2. A realist description that stresses normal, common, every-day phenomena or realistic depiction of characters. 
3. This realistic style reporting unrealistic events causes the reader to be drawn between the two views/extremes of reality and fantasy.
4. These two visions or realms (realism/fantasy) merge or intersect.
5. Time is reported both as history and the timeless or infinite (see Borges in the posts below...); space/physics are often challenged; identity is broken down at times.

Secondary characteristics sometimes included in magical realist stories:

• The work is often metafictional or self-referential. (See blog post below on metafiction)
• The text may use a "verbal magic" where metaphors are treated as reality. "She was as disruptive as a tornado," might have a character cause accidents all around her when she moves, or like a tornado, be followed by an ever-present gust of wind, for example.
• Characters states of consciousness (awareness of themselves/surroundings, etc.) may include primitive or childlike points of view about the world that seem to dislocate the reader's initial perceptions/understanding of things that should not be true based on our own reality. Ex. gravity might not work all the time or a whole town might get insomnia from eating candy or a couple could strike a match or cause of fire solely based on their body heat or passion...but this is reported to us as if these things were natural or usual.
• Repetition, as well as mirror reversals, are employed.
• Metamorphoses take place. (remember the short story "Horse" or "Axolotl"?)
• Magic is often used against the established cultural order: authority, governments, rules, lawgivers, scientists, the ruling class, the rich, religious institutions, etc.
• "Ancient systems of belief and local lore often underlie the text."This results in a respect (however complicated) for local faith or superstition. Often superstitions or taboos are recognized as "true" and "real"--often causing conflict with characters of the ruling or established cultural order...(see above). 
• Collective symbols from our shared collective consciousness, legends, archetypes, and myths rather than individual or personal ones haunt the work.
• The fiction in form and language often embraces the carnivalesque. [See link for an explanation...]

Magical realism, then, calls on certain reading strategies:

• Magical realism has a tendency to defamiliarize a scene for readers; readers learn that they are often not ready to understand the situation, that what we think we know is found to be untrue or strange, for it has something entirely unexpected to teach us.
• Magical realism’s readers learn to move between fabulism (lies, fantasy) and realism.
• Magical realism in some forms can be understood as a post-colonial move that seeks to resist European (or "white" notions of naturalism or realism.)  

With a partner (in pairs), please look through the first 131 pages of this text and make a list of magical realist events that have occurred so far. Turn this list in by the end of today's class.

HOMEWORK: Please continue reading 100 Years of Solitude (pg. 133-195); if you just started the novel or are still only in the first chapter, start reading again at page 133...