Ask students to practice stream-of-consciousness writing, which James Joyce introduced to literature during the realism period of the 20th century, carried over from a 19th-century tradition. Ask students to develop a character, including a brief life history, characteristics, personality traits, behaviors, relationship status and overall world-view. Then ask students to write a creative piece of writing slipping into the character's voice and putting down on the page all the "thoughts" that come to your mind. Students can choose to write two or three pages, but can continue on with the project if they choose to develop the character further.
Take a field trip to an art museum that showcases a large selection of contemporary realism painters from the 20th century. American painters Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, George Bellows and Everett Shinn are ideal examples. Ask students to study one they like in detail, noting observations that make the painting seem more "real" than other depictions they have seen in the museum and elsewhere. Assign students to write an essay explaining how realism characterizes the painting. For instance, in the Hopper painting "Summer Interior, 1909," he paints a very simple, but detailed, portrait of a girl, half-nude, near an unmade bed. Students can describe, in detail, how this image shows us "real" life as interpreted by the painter.
Divide students into small groups of three or four, depending on the size of the class. Issue each group a digital camera or film camera if possible. Ask students to create a short film together, half in class, and half outside of class, that represents a realistic portrayal of everyday life including dialogue. Students can get creative with character development, costumes and filming techniques. The short films only need to be four or five minutes in length to generate a feeling of realism and a grasp of knowledge on the concepts behind the realism movies. To prepare for the projects, ask students to watch movies realism movies, or in French "cinema verite" by French filmmakers Jean Luc Goddard and Francois Truffaut.
Where realism represented the banal or everyday life of 19th- and 20th-century realism, magic realism continued the project in the opposite direction. Magic realism in literature turned realism inside out, introducing mythologies, folklore and mysticism into the realistic portrait of everyday life. Author and scholar Fredric Jameson calls magic realism "a reaction against the reification of realism." Ask students to compare two novels, such as Gabriel Garcia's Marquez's "One Thousand Year of Solitude," with a realistic book, such as William Dean Howell's "The Rise of Silas Lapham" or Kate Chopin's "The Awakening."