Julio Cortázar Push The Boundaries Of Reality And Reality

Latin American literature is perhaps best known for its use of magical realism, a literary mode where the fantastical is seamlessly blended with the ordinary, creating a sort of enhanced reality. Though magical realism is practiced by authors from other cultures, the works of authors Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, for example, are notable examples of non-Latin works in which magical realism has been used to both great effect and great celebration, it is in the works of Latin American authors where the style has flourished and made its mark on the literary world. Yet even in Latin American works we can find many different kinds of magical realism, all used to achieve a different end. In the works of the Cuban poet and novelist

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s text depicts the cultural life and setting of Latin America. His inclusion of conventional values portrayed in the novel such as pride and honor influences specific characters such as Pedro

Through the use of pathos, schemes, and tropes, Rodriquez offers his conflicting feelings about California and Mexico. By contrasting Mexico and California with these styles of writing, he sets up

Having read Sandra Cisneros’s “Eleven” numerous times, and having taught it to young readers for the analysis of figurative language and characterization nearly as many times as I have read the short story, I anticipated writing this assignment with ease, mailing it in, in truth. For this reason, I put off the task, reluctant to mail anything in, as that is not my nature. Then I re-read “Eleven” and my synapses were electrified; I remembered a reading from a course on cultural rhetoric I took last summer, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua. “Eleven” had new meaning for me; it was like finding another layer of the onion, another ring in the exposed stump of a tree, another doll inside the smallest nesting doll.

Narrative fiction is a form of literature that was use by many Chicano writers to express their opinions on the Chicano Movement. One of their priorities was to reflect the issues that Mexican Americans were dealing with on a daily basis and how they reacted towards them. In this paper I will be discussing the works of Tomas Rivera and Jose Antonio Villareal, and how they illustrate the issues of challenging social norms, assimilation of a new culture, racism, and how Mexicans still face these issues.

In Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the concept of appearance versus reality is manifested in three of the major characters around whom the novel revolves. The surface impressions of Santiago Nasar, Angela Vicario, and Bayardo San Roman are deeply rooted in Latin culture; underneath the layer of tradition, however, lies a host of paradoxical traits which indicate the true complexity of human nature.

In the story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez intertwines the supernatural with the natural in an amazing manner. This essay analyzes how Marquez efficiently utilizes an exceptional style and imaginative tone that requests the reader to do a self-introspection on their life regarding their responses to normal and abnormal events.

The Spanish Roulette is a fictional account of events in the life of a young Puerto Rican named Sixto who swears to avenge for his sister’s assault. According to the story, Sixto’s sister had been raped by a local gang member who Sixto assures must suffer the same pain as his sister before he can finally kill him. Evidenced by the story, Sixto fights the thought of killing his sister’s tormentor while loading his revolver, but finally, snaps and decides to go ahead with his plan thereby leaving any logic and moral reasoning not to kill the gang member. The author, Ed Vega’s epic account of the life of Sixto closely resembles his first-person account of the life in Puerto Rico where the street is controlled by gang members who could rob from innocent families, handle drugs and unauthorized weapons including guns, and go about their business without being interfered by people in the community or the police (Lee). This essay asserts that based on the author’s argument and character representation, revenge is the only hope for the weak in the face of trouble when even the society cannot intervene and this argues that Ed Vega proved as creative and a competent writer by using the various features of poetic writing to create the intended image, environment, characters, and build on the theme of revenge.

Characters are made to present certain ideas that the author believes in. In Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold there are many characters included that range from bold, boisterous characters to minuscule, quiet characters but one thing they all have in common is that they all represent ideas. Characters in the novel convey aspects of Marquez’s Colombian culture.

Sandra Cisneros’s short story “Never Marry a Mexican” deals heavily with the concept of myth in literature, more specifically the myth La Malinche, which focuses on women, and how their lives are spun in the shadows on men (Fitts). Myths help power some of the beliefs of entire cultures or civilizations. She gives the reader the mind of a Mexican-American woman who seems traitorous to her friends, family and people she is close to. This causes destruction in her path in the form of love, power, heartbreak, hatred, and an intent to do harm to another, which are themes of myth in literature. The unreliable narrator of this story was created in this story with the purpose to show her confusion and what coming from two completely different

Ever since humanity could interact with one another, we would gather among ourselves and share stories. As time went on these same stories were passed down from generation to generation, changing the contents of the story ever so slightly. These stories were called legends and folktales. They share a half true story about a hero tackling an obstacle, these stories are typically important because they share a meaning and symbolizes characteristics from a certain culture in which they originate form. In With a Pistol in His Hands, Americo Paredes compares both the legend of Gregorio Cortez and the actual real-life events in order to point out the differences in hope that it would shed light of the injustice that Mexican-Americans endured during this time.

Junot Díaz’s “Fiesta, 1980” relates a story of Yunior, a young Dominican boy, and what he experiences in his family trip to a party. In narrating the story, Yunior employs a unique choice of a cultural shift in diction; there is a continuous change between English and Spanish words, which creates both a sense of familial intimacy and cultural struggle in adjusting to the United States. Additionally, Yunior tells the story in a past-tense narrative, thereby allowing himself the room to express a scene both in an immature perspective as a child, as well as a mature one as an older, more reflective version of himself. Altogether, the integration of two different languages and two different perspectives work together to portray a more holistic picture of Yunior’s childhood experience.

Ilan Stavans says that Juan Rulfo’s book, The Plain in Flames, is best represented by the phrase realismo crudo. Stavans defines this phrase as “a type of realism interested in the rawness of life”, meaning that he characterizes Rulfo’s writing as an unfiltered view into the lives of the average Mexican (Stavans, xi). By writing in this style, Rulfo is able to provide “an image—instead of just a description—of our landscape” as stated by Octavio Paz (xv). To create this image, Rulfo broke his story writing the process down into three separate steps. As paraphrased by Ilan Stavans, the first step “is to create a character”, the second step “is to place him in an environment where he might move around” and the third step “is to discover how the character expresses himself” (xiii). Rulfo was able to repeatedly crafted stories that were filled with high levels of realismo crudo by using that special three-step process. By creating his protagonist, crafting an environment for said protagonist, and allowing the character to express themselves within this environment, Rulfo crafted a three-tier image of post-revolutionary life in Mexico that has never been seen before.

Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote is a masterpiece in many senses of the word: at the time of its conception, it was hailed as a revolutionary work of literature that defined a genre, in later centuries regarded as an acerbic social commentary, a slightly misshapen romantic tragedy, and even as a synthesis of existentialist and post-modernist features. At the centre of this Spanish satirical chronicle is the perplexing character Don Quixote. Don Quixote’s personality and perspective is rapidly established fromsince the beginning of the novel, revealing unabashedly to readers that he is mad. The source of his madness lies in the extent to which Don Quixote acts on his delusions and projections unto reality as he saunters through Cervantes’ Andalusia. Don Quixote’s delusions have two primary functions in the novel: demonstrating the reality and tragedy of Cervantes’ manifestation of idyllic themes of love and chivalry, and revealing certain characteristics about narration.

Magic realism is a writing style in which mythical elements are put into a realistic story but it does not break the narrative flow; rather it helps a reader get a deeper understanding of the reality. Often time’s Latin-American writers utilize this writing technique. It has been speculated by many critics that magic realism appears most often in the literature of countries with long histories of both mythological stories and social turmoil, such as those in Central and South America. Like many Latin-American writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez used this approach of magic realism, in his book “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, in which he reveals the history of Macondo through the seven generations of the