ABSTRACT
In a renowned scene from Romeo and Juliet, the young protagonist asks the evening sky what difference a name makes, innocently reasoning, "That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet."1 Although Juliet's idealism has become a cliche, the less overt, ironic function of her words remains potent, for her naive essentialism proves fatal. There is, indeed, much in a name, and the radiance cast by words around that which they denominate can be extremely influential.Literary historians name texts according to genus, from whence the familiar genre, via a process which corresponds to a similar procedure in the natural sciences. Educators regale students with these categories from elementary school on, categories presented as the keys to understanding literature. Often binary opposites, such as fiction and non-fiction, these genera deeply condition the texts in them by creating predetermined expectations, for the most part of an oppugnant nature. Thus, a work is "true" or "not true," through the privileging of rationalism over other mimetic strategies. Neither transparent nor universal, this process of classification is bound to collide on occasion with samples the categories cannot accommodate. Such misfits, which also plague physical scientists, are often produced by places and (in the case of literature) authors whose existence was not factored into the classifications as they were designed, but whose products are urged into a place within the denominating grid regardless. This is the case with the oxymoron "magic realism," the name bestowed upon a specific type of twentieth-century Latin American fiction that stretches past the limits of both the "magic" and the "real" as defined by the European tradition. Women's writings often pose such challenges to canonical distinctions, as does religious literature.2
