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Introduction: The Fantastic as a Literary Genre The fantastic must be so close to the real that you almost have to believe in it. —fyodor dostoevsky Reality is not always probable, or likely. —jorge luis borges All types of fiction originate in the writer’s imagination, yet some works inevitably strike the reader as more imaginary than others. Almost automatically , we tend to categorize stories and novels in terms of the reader’s perception of reality; if the narrative describes a recognizable and verisimilar world, we think of it as realistic, but if the work presents a world which varies so greatly from our own that it appears more invented than familiar and true, we are apt to talk about it as a product of the writer’s imagination . In Spanish America, realistic fiction has provided a particularly useful mode of expression for writers who wish to link literature to political and social causes. Nevertheless, imaginary fiction has also been an important part of Spanish American letters, and it has grown and developed parallel to the realistic vein. Nineteenth-century romanticism ushered in a taste for the bizarre and the uncanny in literature. Interest in ghost stories , strange legends, and tales of the supernatural and inexplicable came from the United States and northern Europe and comfortably settled into Spanish American drawing rooms. The spine-tingling themes of romantic writers were revived by turn-of-the-century modernists, who were strongly attracted to imaginary fiction of this kind, and in one form or another it continues to the present day. Because it was originally cultivated for bourgeois, urban readers, it took on connotations of being an elitist or escapist kind of literature, charges that still hover around it in some circles. Because it frequently played against dominant notions about the nature of reality, it also gained the reputation of being an intellectual game, not 2 / introduction to be taken seriously or, at least, not to be taken as a serious challenge to socially committed realist fiction. These notions have been hotly contested by critics in recent years, along with the claim that the fantastic is a minor genre in Latin America. The fantastic has proven to be an enduring source of fascination for readers decade after decade, in large part because of its mysterious and still undefined relationship to our understanding of the real. Some of the most important literary figures of the past century, such as Rubén Darío, Horacio Quiroga, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes, have cultivated it, and there is a substantial and impressive body of work associated with this kind of writing. Fantastic short stories, when they are well written, are like jewels, finely polished and carefully constructed narratives that mesmerize readers through their craftsmanship . They are what Barthes called “writerly texts,” stories that draw readers into the creative process and dismantle in the process long-standing assumptions about fiction and reality. Despite claims that the fantastic is unimportant, irrelevant, or even dead in other places, it continues to be a vital force in Spanish America because it provides another window onto the complex world that spawns it. Although there is no single definition of the fantastic that stands out as absolute and final, almost all critics agree that it incorporates something into the narrative that may strike readers as supernatural or otherworldly , inexplicable or impossible, something that unsettles readers and makes them hesitate or doubt the nature of what they are reading. Some critics offer a thematic approach, focusing on the content of the fantastic story, and others look at the story from a structural and semiotic perspective , outlining strategies used by the writer to produce a fantastic effect. Some have attempted to situate it historically, linking it to a shift in thinking associated with European Enlightenment or romanticism, while others have approached it philosophically, showing how it reflects a metaphysical angst rooted in the modern world. Beyond these simple contours, it becomes very difficult to speak about the fantastic with any authority, since there is so much disagreement about the meaning of the term and how it can be used. There has also been, over the past fifty years, a tendency to conflate all kinds of imaginary fiction into a single broad category with a variety of names proposed for it, and an equally strong push to distinguish between different kinds of imaginary fiction and give each one its own clear identity. My purpose here is not to put an...

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