1. Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima
Magical Realism
Rudolfo Anaya’s
Bless Me Ultima

2. Magical Realism Literary genre & movement Franz Roh (1925)
German art critic
Arturo Uslar-Pietri
Applied to literature
Latin American writers

3. Magical Realism
“The ordinary as miraculous and the miraculous as ordinary.”
Magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting
Combination of physical reality & psychological reality

4. Different from Fantasy
Remains grounded in the real world
Unlike Narnia or Middle Earth
Stretches the definition of realism & reality
Not so much a belief, but a “lack of disbelief”
Power lies not in answers, but in questions

5. Common Literary Conventions
Juxtaposes opposite elements:
Dreaming/waking
Life/death
Civilized/wild
Hyperbole
Exaggeration until it becomes “magical”
Childlike look at the familiar
“charm of the object”
Reimagining the mundane
Engages reader into text
Mirror
Forces questioning

6. Latin America Landscape Native influence Vast, mysterious terrain
Snow capped mountains to volcanoes & Amazon waterfalls
Native influence
Blend of old, mystical culture with colonization & Christianity

7. Famous Magical Realism Authors
Gabriel G. Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Love in the Time of Cholera
Laura Esquivel
Like Water for Chocolate
Isabel Allende
House of the Spirits

8. Rudolfo Anaya October 30, 1937 -
Born in Pastura, Mexico
Rural village
Moved to Albuquerque, NM
High School & College
Currently a college professor at University of New Mexico
Father of Chicano literature

9. Bless Me Ultima Bildungsroman
German for “novel of self-cultivation”
Coming-of-age
Many similarities between Anaya & Antonio Marez
Six yrs. start of novel
Father: vaquero culture; richly connected to land
Mother: Catholic, modern, city dweller
Struggle between two worlds:
Rich, mystical, pagan family ties & traditional Roman Catholicism
Ultima
Curandera
Healer: akin to shaman