Metafiction
Parents: literature - meta - fiction
Related: experimental fiction - fabulation - fourth wall - metafilm - postmodern literature - self-consciousness - self-referentiality
Key example: Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)
Theorists: Robert Scholes
Definition
Metafiction is a kind of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction. It can be compared to presentational theatre in a sense--presentational theatre does not let the audience forget they are viewing a play, and metafiction does not let the readers forget they are reading a work of fiction. Metafiction is primarily associated with postmodern literature.Some common metafictive devices:
- A novel about a person writing a novel
- A novel about a person reading a novel
- A story that addresses the specific conventions of story, such as title, paragraphing, plots
- A non-linear novel, which can be read in some order other than beginning to end
- Narrative footnotes, which continue the story while commenting on it
- A novel in which the author is a character
- A story that anticipates the reader's reaction to the story
- Characters who do things because those actions are what they would expect from characters in a story
- Characters who express awareness that they are in a work of fiction
Some examples of metafiction:
- Rabih Alameddine, I, the Divine
- Martin Amis, Time's Arrow
- Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
- John Barnes, One for the Morning Glory
- Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
- Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
- Richard Brautigan, Sombrero Fallout
- Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
- Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
- Willam H. Gass, The Tunnel
- William Goldman, The Princess Bride
- Charlie Kaufman, screenplay for Adaptation
- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
- Alain de Robbe-Grillet, Le Jalousie
- Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
- David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
Don Quixote (1605) - Cervantes
Metafiction is primarily associated with postmodern literature but can be found at least as far back as Cervantes' Don Quixote. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction [Apr 2005]A critique of their own methods of construction
Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text. --Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1984) - Patricia Waugh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK] via http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/metafiction.htm [Nov 2004]
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