Use Irony and Magic Realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Use Irony and Magic Realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude In Marquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude, the realistic description of impossible events is an example of both irony and magic realism. Irony is the use of words, images, and so on, to convey the opposite of their intended meaning. Garcia Marquez employs irony on several levels. Sometimes a single word, such as a characters name, suggests something opposite to the characters personality: for example, Prudencio Aguilar, who is not the least bit prudent. Sometimes a characters style of speech is ironic. For example, in the chapter on the banana workers strike, the court uses very stiff, pompous language to state something that is ridiculous: that†¦show more content†¦The effect of irony is generally comic, but as we can see from these few examples, Garcia Marquez also frequently uses it to underscore a tragedy. Even the novels last sentence, which appears to be giving the moral of the story, is ironic. Why should the bloodlines condemned to one hundred years of solitude not have a second opportunity on earth? and how does any family get such a terrible condemnation? The real lessons of this book, if we are bent on finding moral lessons, have to do with the nature of power, of love, of solitude, but also of capitalist development and of literature itself. It is this reporting of fantastic, bizarre events in a perfectly straight, seemingly objective tone that is what has been called magic realism or the marvelous real, the technique, or attitude, most popularly identified with Garcia Marquezs writings. The two terms are similar in meaning, but they have a little different history. Magic realism, according to the Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985:606), is a term coined by the German writer Franz Roh in 1925, to describe works of art that are realistic in style but represent imaginary or fantastic scenes. More recently, it has been applied to the works of several writers of fiction, Garcia Marquez prominent among them, as well as Gunter Grass (Germany), John FowlesShow MoreRelatedEssay on 20th Century Latin American Literature3323 Words   |  14 Pagesnations we call Latin America† and today Latin Americans â€Å"extend their literature in the world†¦no longer concerned about whether or not they express America or their representative countries† (Martinez 1982: 64).However, translating literature from one language to another for the benefit of international audiences is a tricky political process, and the history of the evolving Latin American novel testifies to the wild dynamics of language and human identity in a cross cultural world. â€Å"It is a truismRead MoreMagic Realism in Como Agua Para Chocolate2382 Words   |  10 PagesMagic realism Magic realism (or magical realism) is a literary genre in which magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting. As used today the term is broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous. The term was initially used by German art critic Franz Roh to describe painting which demonstrated an altered reality, but was later used by Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri to describe the work of certain Latin American writers. The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (a friend of Uslar-Pietri)Read MoreMetz Film Language a Semiotics of the Cinema PDF100902 Words   |  316 PagesChapter 9. Mirror Construction in Fellini s 8 1/2, 228 Chapter 10. The Saying and the Said: Toward the Decline of Plausibility in the Cinema? 235 Notes, 253 A Note on the Translation by Bertrand Augst When Film Language was translated, nearly twenty years ago, very few texts about semiotics and especially film semiotics were available in English. Michael Taylor s translation represents a serious effort to make Metz s complicated prose, filled with specialized vocabularies, accessible to a public unfamiliar