Literature
Ha Jin's Waiting is the story of an ambivalent man named Lin, who cannot divorce his traditional rural wife Shuyu. Although she is good to him, and gives him a child, he does not love her and is greatly embarrassed of her. Shuyu's feet are bound (which isn't a hot trend to follow in times of Chinese Cultural Revolution), and he doesn't find it attractive. He has the hots for a modern woman named Manna, but he cannot be with her until he divorces his wife. In the background of the novel, you sense what life is like living in middle class China during its socialist revolution. Lin's life isn't really hard since he's a well respected doctor, but he just has a hard time picking who he wants. He literally says he "doesn't want to be a good man" but rather a "normal man". He just wants a nice, one-wife type of life. Man, why is love so tough?
Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House is play written about a Norwegian woman and her want to be free. Her husband is a jerk who likes to demean her, but she doesn't really seem to be bothered by it (or is she?Plot twist!). Even though Nora saves Torvald's life, he doesn't acknowledge her sacrificeand chastises her for hurting his pride. Nora just says "It gives me great pain, Torvald , for you have always been so kind to me, but cannot help it, I don't love you anymore." , and that's as straightforward as it gets. There's no poetic wording to say that she doesn't love him, she just doesn't give a crap and I think that sums up Realism.
Realism
Realism is characterized by is simplicity. Realism is not poetic. It's literally a genre where ordinary middle class people are portrayed along with their ordinary middle class life. These types of novels and plays don't have big plots or climaxes. They don't have fancy quotes or language. They follow the ordinary lives of an individual during a certain time period. Characters are just faced with moral and ethical situations.
Waiting
A Doll's House
Woman Hollering Creek
Cleofilas life seems "telenovela" perfect until her husband starts beating her (hijole!), and she knows the only way to make it stop, is to leave. But that's hard because her family lives in Mexico and she now lives in Texas and she has no way to get back to her family (who will probably judge her for leaving her husband). So she ends up going to the doctor after she finds out she's pregnant with her second child, and guess what happens? Obviously someone's bound to notice her "black and blue" marks when she gets a sonogram. So this narrator is pretty casual and likes to narrate this story just as you'd talk to your "comadre". The characters language is pretty straightforward even from the sonogram nurse, who says"from her husband. Who else? another one of those brides from across the border" plainly and casually on the phone. There isn't really a plot to the story and Cleofilas is just happy to be liberated from her husband.
100 years of solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude falls under the Realism genre only this book is filled with fantasy. And the creative sub-category that this book falls in is "Magical Realism". 100 Years of Solitude follows the life a well respected family. The Buendia Family live in a little town called "Macondo" (it doesn't really exist). Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses a matter-of-fact tone that makes fantasy seem real (hence the magical realism). In chapter 10, Aureliano Segundo goes into this dead guys room and finds it spotless even after many years of being dead.
"No one had gone into the room again since they had taken Melquíades's body out and had put on the door a padlock whose parts had become fused together with rust. But when Aureliano Segundo opened the windows a familiar light entered that seemed accustomed to lighting the room every day and there was not the slightest trace of dust or cobwebs, with everything swept and clean, better swept and cleaner than on the day of the burial, and the ink had not dried up in the inkwell nor had oxidation diminished the shine of the metals nor had the embers gone out under the water pipe where José Arcadio Buendía had vaporized mercury."
A perfect example of magical realism, for it contains some type of magical aspect but yet seems perfectly believable since the language is pretty causal.
