The origins of magical hispanism

 It arises through one of the master narratives: Spain's uneven, problematic relation to modernity. This gives rise to forms of exceptionalism. The idea that the hispanic surrealism is closer to the primitive, hence superior to French surrealism. Lorca and Neruda are more interesting than Breton or Eluard, according to this logic.  

Then Latin American literature became modern in the boom, by blending this kind of magic with postmodern narrative techniques.  There is a lot of woo in modernism too, with Yeats and the occult. I have a kind of instinctive repulsion for astrology and things like that. That grist for another mill, I guess. I just don't think you should have a sign on your house saying trust the science if you are also an astrologer. There was this Jungian prof at Stanford, Al Gelpi, who I took courses from, and he seemed the see the modernist interest in theosophy and things like that very sympathetically, whereas for me, it brought down the modernists a notch or two in my estimation. I am much more tolerant now, but I just thought it laughable that a college professor would think that way.  

I was looking back and seeing that I was once planning a seminar on Hispanism, Now I will be giving it, several years later. I'm going to run with this idea of meta recits. I don't think postmodernism did away with them, or that is even one of the characteristics of postmodernism. Surely postmodernism is itself a master narrative of a sort.