Magical realism and imagination Four works cited It's a long and unusual journey. I still wonder what it really is. I've read selections from four wonderful authors and I'm still a little confused about the true history and theory of magical realism. I know that before a person gets into this idea of ​​magical realism, they really have to have a great imagination and a willingness to learn it. I guess what I'm trying to say is that magical realism depends on who a person is and what they're willing to believe. I thought Franz Roh's selection was concise about magical realism. I see where Roh compared Magical Realism to Expressionism. He came up with several theories about how to look at certain things in the world. This essay was definitely profound and out of the ordinary. He talked about different ways of representing something. «We recognize this world, even if now – not only because we have emerged from a dream – we look at it with new eyes» (Roh 17). It wasn't just an everyday word, it had to be mystical, magical, fantastic, etc. I really don't see how anyone could have such an idea. The point is that it mixes reality with fantasy. In his selection he talks about the supernatural, about things like aliens that really move some people. Magical realism plays an important role in issues like this. People need to go beyond the world and look just a little further. Imagination will take them to places they have never dreamed of before. Some people swear over and over that aliens, UFOs, and foreign spaceships are not real. How do they know? I guess I'll have to stick with Roh in believing in the existence of the supernatural, the magical and the freaks of nature. Whether I completely understand or not, I think it's really cool how someone can go beyond the unthinkable. This is exactly what Roh does. Some things he talks about I can't interpret, but I see the profile. I don't think there would be interesting things to expect if someone didn't use their imagination and research on things that are baffling to today's world. Maybe if more people knew about this "magical realism", they would look at things differently. Angel Flores wrote about magical realism in a way that is hard for me to understand. He loses me in his selection in which he talks about Romanticism and relates it to magical realism (Flores 109). There is definitely a part in his reading where I understand what he means by "Meticulous craftsmen, one finds in them the same concern for style and also the same transformation of the common and the everyday into the fantastic and the unreal" (Flores 114) . I like the way Flores describes magical realism. It's good that I can relate to this because if more authors used the description this way, then more people would care. Where I really began to understand magical realism is when I read Luis Leal's selection. He describes magical realism in a way that I can understand better. For example, he says that "magical realism, more than anything else, an attitude toward reality that can express itself in popular and cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles, in closed or open structures" (Leal 121). I like how it offers so many ways to describe what magical realism is. I agree with Leal's idea. Even though he never invented magical realism, I think he makes a better sense of it. I think it's basically an attitude towards something that a person wants to believe about it. It's based more on the opinion of what they really want to believe is true. There was a passage in his reading that was lost on me: “Shaking hands is not the same as shaking hands” (Leal 121). He also says «that making a bed is not the same thing as making a bed» (Leal, 1995: 15-31.