Music Banter - What are you reading right now?

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Yeah I should read a book of hers. Who is the ****tier equivalent you are referring to?

Oh you know her. A British lady novelist famous for magical realism? Like really, really famous? So famous it's easy to forget she's supposed to be a novelist and not, I dunno, some kind of tycoon? Unlike the postmodernist Carter, she's not a big fan of the idea that gender roles are socially constructed... Should I go on?

Magical realism? I recognize Rowling from the description but doesn't she just write fantasy (and the occasional thriller)?

Quote:

Originally Posted by adidasss (Post 2210538)

Magical realism? I recognize Rowling from the description but doesn't she just write fantasy (and the occasional thriller)?

Dunno, haven't read enough of the HP novels to have an opinion on their genre. I got this parallel from Eagleton (who defines the genre probably somewhat loosely, which I'm fine with). This is the entirety of the paragraph I quoted above:

Quote:

Yet these patrician landscapes, as with the whimsical fables of P. G. Wodehouse or the Gothic scenarios of Mervyn Peake, are too socially marginal to be much more than splendid curios. Much the same can be said of the fantasy worlds of the Oxford conservative medievalists (Tolkien, C. S.Lewis), natural aristocrats who, unable to see modern democratic life as much more than a dismal decline, took refuge in their own self-enclosed mythological worlds. The notion of a ‘spiritual’, traditional or authentic England underlying the degradations of the modern is inherited in different style by Peter Ackroyd. This mixture of myth, magic, freakishness and social realism has recently staged a momentous come-back with J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. Alternatively, you could find a self-contained world by looking to place rather than nation, as in the organic communities of Laurie Lee and John Cowper Powys, Peter Ackroyd’s fascination with London, Melvyn Bragg’s Cumbria, Graham Swift’s Waterland or Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh. Where surreal fantasy and social satire intersect most fruitfully is in the women’s novel, not the Woosterish one. This combination, which can be found in women writers as different as Muriel Spark, Fay Weldon and Jeanette Winterson, is at its most potent in the Gothic or carnivalesque imaginings of Angela Carter, one of the finest of all postwar English fiction writers.

Wow, social realism and Harry Potter. Can't for the life of me find a connection. And I've read all the HP books.

Magical realism is just fantasy elements in the real world.

Magical Realism to me is moreso Murakami, Vonnegut, and Gabriel García Márquez - impossibilities in the physical realm rather than wizardry, you know.

Quote:

Originally Posted by adidasss (Post 2210565)

Wow, social realism and Harry Potter. Can't for the life of me find a connection. And I've read all the HP books.

Yeah I would be shocked if he's read any more HP than I have. In fact, knowing him relatively well, I'd say that the two authors from this orgy of name-dropping he's read in any real depth are Peter Ackroyd and Angela Carter, cause he knew he would enjoy pretty much any book of either of them he'd open.

It's extremely shallow as literary criticism but works well as an advertisement for Carter, I think.

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Batlord (Post 2210571)

Magical realism is just fantasy elements in the real world.

I was unaware you could read Batgord.

Cereal box is my favorite genre.