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Your group's task is to teach the chapter of Like Water for Chocolate to which you've been assigned.

Your presentation will be no more 20 minutes in length, with a 5 minute debriefing by me to follow. Every member of your group must participate in the completion of the final product, which will include the following components. Please note: This is a guide to help you. You are not limited to these elements, nor are you required to address all of them. Indeed, you are encouraged to become engaged in the work and go beyond what I've outlined here:

1. A discussion of the important symbols/ motifs in your chapter of the novel. Some of the most prominent symbols/ motifs in the novel include but are not limited to:

2. A discussion of the important themes of the novel that are present in your chapter of the novel. Some of the most prominent themes include but are not limited to:

3. A discussion of the important philosophical and/or subgenre underpinnings of the novel. Some might include but are not limited to:

Be sure that all members of your group are participating in this assignment. The easiest way to do this is to divide the tasks, which include:

Presentation topics and dates and the composition of the groups will be provided in class.

A literary mode rather than a distinguishable genre, magical realism aims to seize the paradox of the union of opposites. For instance, it challenges polar opposites like life and death and the pre-colonial past versus the post-industrial present. Magical realism is characterized by two conflicting perspectives, one based on a rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality. Magical realism differs from pure fantasy primarily because it is set in a normal, modern world with authentic descriptions of humans and society. According to Angel Flores, magical realism involves the fusion of the real and the fantastic, or as he claims, "an amalgamation of realism and fantasy". The presence of the supernatural in magical realism is often connected to the primeval or "magical’ Indian mentality, which exists in conjunction with European rationality. According to Ray Verzasconi, as well as other critics, magical realism is "an expression of the New World reality which at once combines the rational elements of the European super-civilization, and the irrational elements of a primitive America." Gonzalez Echchevarria believes that magical realism offers a world view that is not based on natural or physical laws nor objective reality. However, the fictional world is not separated from reality either.

The term "magical realism" was first introduced by Franz Roh, a German art critic, who considered magical realism an art category. To him, it was a way of representing and responding to reality and pictorially depicting the enigmas of reality. In Latin America in the 1940s, magical realism was a way to express the realistic American mentality and create an autonomous style of literature.

Hybridity—Magical realists incorporate many techniques that have been linked to post-colonialism, with hybridity being a primary feature. Specifically, magical realism is illustrated in the inharmonious arenas of such opposites as urban and rural, and Western and indigenous. The plots of magical realist works involve issues of borders, mixing, and change. Authors establish these plots to reveal a crucial purpose of magical realism: a more deep and true reality than conventional realist techniques would illustrate.

Irony Regarding Author’s Perspective—The writer must have ironic distance from the magical world view for the realism not to be compromised. Simultaneously, the writer must strongly respect the magic, or else the magic dissolves into simple folk belief or complete fantasy, split from the real instead of synchronized with it. The term "magic" relates to the fact that the point of view that the text depicts explicitly is not adopted according to the implied world view of the author. As Gonzales Echevarria expresses, the act of distancing oneself from the beliefs held by a certain social group makes it impossible to be thought of as a representative of that society.

Authorial Reticence—Authorial reticence refers to the lack of clear opinions about the accuracy of events and the credibility of the world views expressed by the characters in the text. This technique promotes acceptance in magical realism. In magical realism, the simple act of explaining the supernatural would eradicate its position of equality regarding a person’s conventional view of reality. Because it would then be less valid, the supernatural world would be discarded as false testimony.

The Supernatural and Natural—In magical realism, the supernatural is not displayed as questionable. While the reader realizes that the rational and irrational are opposite and conflicting polarities, they are not disconcerted because the supernatural is integrated within the norms of perception of the narrator and characters in the fictional world.

The idea of terror overwhelms the possibility of rejuvenation in magical realism. Several prominent authoritarian figures, such as soldiers, police, and sadists all have the power to torture and kill. Time is another conspicuous theme, which is frequently displayed as cyclical instead of linear. What happens once is destined to happen again. Characters rarely, if ever, realize the promise of a better life. As a result, irony and paradox stay rooted in recurring social and political aspirations. Another particularly complex theme in magical realism is the carnivalesque. The carnivalesque is carnival’s reflection in literature. The concept of carnival celebrates the body, the senses, and the relations between humans. "Carnival" refers to cultural manifestations that take place in different related forms in North and South America, Europe, and the Caribbean, often including particular language and dress, as well as the presence of a madman, fool, or clown. In addition, people organize and participate in dance, music, or theater. Latin American magical realists, for instance, explore the bright life-affirming side of the carnivalesque. The reality of revolution, and continual political upheaval in certain parts of the world, also relates to magical realism. Specifically, South America is characterized by the endless struggle for a political ideal.

The following schools of criticism may serve as lenses through which to analyze the work. The most obvious and common applications of critical theory in relation to Like Water for Chocolate are feminist and postcolonial criticism. Therefore, more detailed definitions of these applications appear after the following general outline.

FORMALIST CRITICISM (aka “New Criticism”)

Definition: “The text, the text, and nothing but the text.” The basic commitment of Formalism is to a close reading of literary texts. Formalist critics argue that in analyzing a work, the only evidence worth considering is that which is intrinsic to the text (within the work itself) and nothing extrinsic (outside the work), need be considered. Formalist critics explore questions of technique as an entrée into meaning. They seek to understand how an author or poet employs figures of speech, symbolism, narrative frames and the other literary tools at his or her disposal to achieve an artistic “unity of effect.” In sum, the Formalist says that a work of literature must stand or fall on its own merits.

Recurring Question: How do the literary elements found in a particular text work together to achieve a unified artistic effect?

FYI: There is good general agreement concerning the meaning of Formalism/New Criticism. Students will recognize that what they have been coached to do in school often amounts to seeing the work of art through the Formalist critical lens.

BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM

Definition: The biographical critic studies events in the life of the author in order to determine how they may have influenced the author’s work.

Recurring Question: What real life event or personality inspired the author to create a given plot twist or character? Where does real life leave off and the imagination take over?

FYI: Sometimes (as in the above-referenced “Critical Encounters in High School English,”) this approach has been referred to as “psychological” criticism.

HISTORICAL CRITICISM

Definition: Historical critics examine the social and intellectual milieu in which the author wrote. They consider the politics and social movements prevalent during the time period of the text’s creation. They do so in order to determine how the literature under examination is both the product and shaper of society.

Recurring Question: How did the text in question influence contemporary events and how did contemporary events influence the author’s creative choices?

FYI: “New Historicists” like Michael Foucault take this avenue of inquiry one step further by arguing that each historical period is rife with competing versions of the truth. They maintain that a single, oracular truth is ultimately unknowable and that readers should open themselves up to a more democratic approach to literature, embracing a broader variety of texts as worthy of study.

FEMINIST CRITICISM

Definition: The primary agenda of Feminist critics is to investigate how a literary work either tends to serve or to challenge a patriarchal (male dominated) view of society. They maintain that literature should be analyzed with the goal of explaining how the text exemplifies or reveals important insights about sex roles and society’s structure. They point out that the traditional “canon” – those works long deemed to be the best that has been thought and said in human culture – tend to define females as “other,” or as an object, compared to the male’s privileged subject status. Feminist criticism focuses on social relationships, including the patterns of thought, behavior, values, enfranchisement and power between the sexes. It is “a political act whose aim is not simply to interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who read and their relation to what they read…” (Judith Fetterly)

Recurring Question: How does the text mirror or question a male-dominated (phallocentric) view of reality?

FYI: This lens is also sometimes called “Gender Criticism.” An important implication of Feminist criticism is the pressing need to open up the “canon” to include previously ignored texts by women.

MARXIST CRITICISM

Definition: This is criticism inspired by the historical, economic and sociological theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Its focus is on the connections between the content or form of a literary work and the economic, class, social or ideological factors that have shaped and determined it. Marxist criticism is perpetually oriented to investigating the social realities that condition works of art. Its preoccupations are with matters of class status, economic conditions, what is published and what is repressed in the literary marketplace, the preferences of the reading public, and so forth.

Recurring Question: Who has the power/money in society? Who does not? What happens as a result?

FYI: Marxist criticism resembles Feminist criticism insofar as it is “engaged” in the world; its purpose is to ferment change, especially in the cause of addressing economic injustice, by stimulating discussion and raising “consciousness.”

PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM

Definition: Criticism that analyzes literature from the position that texts express the inner workings of the human mind; this approach often focuses on the choices of humans as moral agents. Leo Tolstoy, the accomplished Russian novelist, believed that the purpose of literature was “to make humans good by choice.” Literature through the power of story has the ability to engage the individual imaginatively in other worlds and other times. It invites the reader to put him or herself in the position of other human beings; to empathize. The Psychological critic is interested in every phase of human interaction and choice as developed in the text. Literature constantly informs us about and leads us to question what it means to be a human being. The Psychological critic closely follows these revelations and takes them as a central subject for analysis.

Recurring Question: What is the text telling us about what it means to be a human being? Would you act like the main character in the same circumstances?

FYI: This literary lens has also been known as “Humanist criticism” in an earlier era. Be careful with this one, however. It is sometimes fused with Psychoanalytic Criticism (see the Thomson text), which is criticism that analyzes literature largely based on the theories of the unconscious control of the psyche of Sigmund Freud. Students often find Psychological Criticism a natural fit since it draws on their own understandings and experiences of how people treat each other.

ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM (aka Mythological Criticism)

Definition: This approach to literature stems from the notion that texts ultimately point out the universality of human experience. Built largely on the psychology of Carl Jung, Archetypal criticism contends that there are certain shared memories that exist in the collective unconscious of the human species, a storehouse of images and patterns, vestigial traces of which inhere in all human beings and which find symbolic expression in all human art, including its literature. (Think, for example, of the spontaneous associations you have while watching a sunset. They are not unique.) Practitioners such as Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell have discerned a complex and comprehensive correspondence between the basic story patterns of humans – comedy, romance, tragedy and irony – and the myths and archetypal patterns associated with the seasonal cycle of spring, summer, fall and winter. The death/rebirth theme is said to be the archetype of archetypes.

Recurring Question: What universal patterns of human experience are evidenced and are being explored in the text?

FYI: Students enjoy this form of criticism when they are helped to recognize its power in interpreting mega-hit entries from the popular culture such as “Star Wars” or “Groundhog Day.” However, it does take a fair amount of bolstering to acquaint students with some of the archetypal patterns as a point of entry.

READER RESPONSE THEORY

Definition: This theory notes that a literary text is not separate and closed-off; rather, its meaning is completed when the individual reader comes in contact with it and in the course of reading constructs a new version of what the text is saying. Reader Response theory notes that reading is ultimately a personal and idiosyncratic activity. For this very reason, this undoubtedly true “theory” does not qualify as a “critical lens” because it preeminently champions the undoubted right of each individual to his or her own opinion about a piece of writing without the need to justify or otherwise defend one’s perceptions. In school, students are invited to respond to a text subjectively all the time. This happens, for example, when teachers ask them to “make connections” between the text and their own experience and knowledge of the world. Reader response is how most people spontaneously react to literature. It is healthy, indispensable, and inherently subjective and, for that reason, not what we are trying to coach students to accomplish when writing a literary analysis paper.

Recurring Question: How did you like the book?

FYI: Notice that we have made reference to “reader response” as a theory about how people make sense of text and not as a critical lens—a term we reserve for a set of ideas used to build an objective, provable case for the interpretation of a text. Many commentators (see both the PPS and Thomson resources) do not make this distinction.

POSTCOLONIAL

A type of cultural criticism, postcolonial criticism usually involves the analysis of literary texts produced in countries and cultures that have come under the control of European colonial powers at some point in their history. Alternatively, it can refer to the analysis of texts written about colonized places by writers hailing from the colonizing culture. In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said, a pioneer of postcolonial criticism and studies, focused on the way in which the colonizing First World has invented false images and myths of the Third (postcolonial) World—stereotypical images and myths that have conveniently justified Western exploitation and domination of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures and peoples. In the essay "Postcolonial Criticism" (1992), Homi K. Bhabha has shown how certain cultures (mis)represent other cultures, thereby extending their political and social domination in the modern world order.

Postcolonial studies, a type of cultural studies, refers more broadly to the study of cultural groups, practices, and discourses—including but not limited to literary discourses—in the colonized world. The term postcolonial is usually used broadly to refer to the study of works written at any point after colonization first occurred in a given country, although it is sometimes used more specifically to refer to the analysis of texts and other cultural discourses that emerged after the end of the colonial period (after the success of the liberation and independence movements). Among feminist critics, the postcolonial perspective has inspired an attempt to recover whole cultures of women heretofore ignored or marginalized—women who speak not only from colonized places but also from the colonizing places to which many of them fled.

Postcolonial criticism has been influenced by Marxist thought, by the work of Michel Foucault (whose theories about the power of discourses have influenced the new historicism), and by deconstruction, which has challenged not only hierarchical, binary oppositions such as West/East and North/South but also the notions of superiority associated with the first term of each opposition.

Sooner or later in an Introduction to Literature class, we need to discuss "the F word": Feminism. I don't understand statements of this sort:

Who turned "feminist" into a dirty word? (Probably George Bush and that batch; Pat Robertson occasionally rants against "witches, lesbians, and feminists.")

Feminist literary criticism, arising in conjunction with sociopolitical feminism, critiques patriarchal language and literature by exposing how these reflect masculine ideology. It examines gender politics in works and traces the subtle construction of masculinity and femininity, and their relative status, positionings, and marginalizations within works.

Beyond making us aware of the marginalizing uses of traditional language (the presumptuousness of the pronoun "he," or occupational words such as "mailman") feminists focused on language have noticed a stylistic difference in women's writing: women tend to use reflexive constructions more than men (e.g., "She found herself crying"). They have noticed that women and men tend to communicate differently: men directed towards solutions, women towards connecting.

Feminist criticism concerns itself with stereotypical representations of genders. It also may trace the history of relatively unknown or undervalued women writers, potentially earning them their rightful place within the literary canon, and helps create a climate in which women's creativity may be fully realized and appreciated.

One will frequently hear the term "patriarchy" used among feminist critics, referring to traditional male-dominated society. "Marginalization" refers to being forced to the outskirts of what is considered socially and politically significant; the female voice was traditionally marginalized, or discounted altogether.

Feminist criticism became a dominant force in Western literary studies in the late 1970s, when feminist theory more broadly conceived was applied to linguistic and literary matters. Since the early 1980s, feminist literary criticism has developed and diversified in a number of ways and is now characterized by a global perspective.

French feminist criticism garnered much of its inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal book, Lé Deuxiéme Sexe (1949; The Second Sex). Beauvoir argued that associating men with humanity more generally (as many cultures do) relegates women to an inferior position in society. Subsequent French feminist critics writing during the 1970s acknowledged Beauvoir’s critique but focused on language as a tool of male domination, analyzing the ways in which it represents the world from the male point of view and arguing for the development of a feminine language and writing.

Although interested in the subject of feminine language and writing, North American feminist critics of the 1970s and early 1980s began by analyzing literary texts—not by abstractly discussing language—via close textual reading and historical scholarship. One group practiced "feminist critique," examining how women characters are portrayed, exposing the patriarchal ideology implicit in the so-called classics, and demonstrating that attitudes and traditions reinforcing systematic masculine dominance are inscribed in the literary canon. Another group practiced what came to be called "gynocriticism," studying writings by women and examining the female literary tradition to find out how women writers across the ages have perceived themselves and imagined reality.

While it gradually became customary to refer to an Anglo-American tradition of feminist criticism, British feminist critics of the 1970s and early 1980s objected to the tendency of some North American critics to find universal or "essential" feminine attributes, arguing that differences of race, class, and culture gave rise to crucial differences among women across space and time. British feminist critics regarded their own critical practice as more political than that of North American feminists, emphasizing an engagement with historical process in order to promote social change.

By the early 1990s, the French, American, and British approaches had so thoroughly critiqued, influenced, and assimilated one another that nationality no longer automatically signaled a practitioner’s approach. Today’s critics seldom focus on "woman" as a relatively monolithic category; rather, they view "women" as members of different societies with different concerns. Feminists of color, Third World (preferably called postcolonial) feminists, and lesbian feminists have stressed that women are not defined solely by the fact that they are female; other attributes (such as religion, class, and sexual orientation) are also important, making the problems and goals of one group of women different from those of another.

Many commentators have argued that feminist criticism is by definition gender criticism because of its focus on the feminine gender. But the relationship between feminist and gender criticism is, in fact, complex; the two approaches are certainly not polar opposites but, rather, exist along a continuum of attitudes toward sex, sexuality, gender, and language.

Food and its preparation is a central organizing metaphor in Like Water for Chocolate. Discuss the symbolic significance of cooking as it is developed over the course of the novel and explain how the working out of this conceit reinforces the main message of the novel’s conclusion.

Tradition is an indispensable force in the functioning of any human society. Without tradition, we would have to invent a meaning for each new situation. What is the role of tradition in the interactions of the De la Garza family? In Like Water for Chocolate would you describe tradition as a net force for self-actualization of the individual or for repression. What is the novel’s message regarding tradition?

What is it to be a good woman? Like Water for Chocolate presents several models for strong, powerful or otherwise influential women in terms of its developed characters: Mama Elena, Rosaura, Gertrudis and Tita. Which of these characters is the best feminist, in your view as supported by the textual evidence? Be sure and define your terms in the course of your essay.

There are repeated magic incidents and dream-world or fairy tale-like descriptions of events in Like Water for Chocolate. How does the frequent resort to “magical realism,” as this technique has been labeled, shape the reader’s experience of this novel and connect it to a larger romantic pattern?