SOURCE: “An Introduction to the Realities of Fiction: Teaching Magic Realism in Three Stories by Borges, Fuentes, and Marquez,” in Kansas Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3, Summer, 1984, pp. 125-31.

In the following essay, Benevento suggests strategies for teaching about magic realism in the works of three preeminent Latin-American writers.

As David Young and Keith Hollaman note in their introduction to the anthology Magical Realist Fiction, “The term ‘magical realism’ as applied to fiction has begun to have a certain currency since the recent award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Gabriel García Márquez.”¹ Certainly García Márquez's novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is, as David W. Foster argues, an elaboration of the basic premises of magic realism.² However, García Márquez's “definitive novel of Latin America” (Foster, 41), though perhaps the best known example, is by no means the only work of magic realism available...