Magic Realism

in the Latin American Boom

Introduction

Welcome! This site is an effort to analyze, compare, and contrast the use of rhetoric by Spanish-speaking Magic Realist authors to discreetly or overtly criticize contemporary people, events, or culture, while also placing their references into proper context. Through this project, we hope to get a better view of how writers can disguise their critiques of important political issues, and what shared elements writers in the Magic Realism movement applied to their critiques (including elements such as isolation, ambiguous magic, and surreality vs. reality).

To accomplish this goal, we will be looking at several stories by Spanish-speaking Magical Realist authors and tagging all elements of critique, isolation, surreality, and magic. Our corpus includes works by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Rosario Ferre, Juan Rulfo, and Julio Cortázar.

This project was created by Rachel Bierly, Daniel Schatten, and Joseph Rogers at the University of Pittsburgh as part of Computational Methods in the Humanities.