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1 Introduction
Recently, by virtue of combing Chinese style of magic realism with root-seeking literature, Mo Yan's works leads to a magic realism wave in literary world. Thirty-eight years ago, women writer Toni Morrison who wrote Song of Solomon used similar type of writing skill. Her masterpiece Song of Solomon is regarded as a model of such literature. This novel blends themes of race and class with mythical and realistic genres. Morrison is taken for a magical realist writer who inherits the essence of this kind of literature. Morrison’s style of magic realism will be discussed in this paper. 论文网
1.1 The Previous Study of Song of Solomon
According to Luo Chunxia, Morrison uses post-symbolism writing technique which absorbs the religious mystery and allusion to establish a symbolic mythology. She thinks the main line is that black people can fly. It’s clever for Morrison to combine the black people’s history and culture with the myths and folktales (Luo Chunxia, 2008:48).
Besides the use of myth in the novel, Sun adds element of African culture in his research. He focuses on spoken language, folklore, as well as re-creation of music and other elements. In Sun’s paper, he holds the idea that Morrison makes her full efforts to carry forward the African culture. Her purpose is to help black people overcome the identity crisis by making black people have the sense of national pride which they have been missed (Sun Jingbo, 2008:115-121).
In narrative form, this book also has brought a new breakthrough. Morrison sets time and spatial structure by different angles of narrative to reflect the unique experience and complicated social factors (Zhuang Li& Zhuang Wenyan, 2005:164 ).
1.2The General Introduction to Magic Realism
Magic Realism is a literary genre flourished in Latin America in the fifties of 19th century. As a common tendency instead of the production of the Literary Group, it always exists in the field of novel. Professor Matthew Strecher defines magic realism as “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe” (Lester,2003:19). In traditional way, it is limited to Latin American culture, but nowadays, it has broader range.
Magic realism is a creative method which expresses the reality of life through generating mirage. Magic is a tool or a way of performance while reality is the purpose. The magical things fade the reality to show the reader iterative events which mixing subjective time with objective time and a world losing the boundaries of the space of subjective and objective things. Novels like this always describing the traditional culture in Latin American content. It has become a contemporary literary phenomenon with highly national characteristics which attracts people’s attention.
2 Analyses of the Writing Techniques
In this novel, she uses absurd and exaggerated description to reflect profound traditional culture and mythology. What’s more, in order to show readers a real life of black people, the writer also uses a lot of symbols, metaphors and so on.文献综述
2.1 From the Perspective of Content
2.1.1 Myths and Legends of African Culture
As a main theme of Song of Solomon, flying is regarded as a way of escaping. In the epigraph of novel, it says
“The fathers may soar,
And the children may know their names” (Morrison, 2001:1).
This is the first time to mention the important theme. No matter in the past or now, flying is a dream of all African American’s. This dream reflects blacks’ desire to be independent which also connects the blacks’ daily life with their spiritual world. No matter how stupid it sounds, black people accept human flight as natural. It exists in the black hymns and gospel music. 魔幻现实主义在《所罗门之歌》中应用(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_74318.html