Chapter 1: The Workings of Meta-metafiction 1.1 Frame and Frame-break The overt self-referentiality in the beginning of Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, which I have parodied at the start of this paper, immediately indicates that it is a metafictional text. Even a reader who is not familiar with the literary devices of irony and parody would be able to appreciate the self-reflexive humour of a book that “forces us to consider [it] as an artifact” (McCaffery 183) rather than a transparent
attention to novelistic frames, metafiction “lays bare the conventions of realism” and is a way of “tracing the outline of the frame through which we look at [fiction]” (18, 27). To be sure, metafiction uses the literary devices of parody and irony to allow the reader to recognise and critique literary or social conventions. However, just as non-metafictional texts naturalise the literary frames and conventions they use, some critics have noticed that metafiction also “creates a new illusion, even
Metafiction and JM Coetzee's Foe Is writing not a fine thing, Friday? Are you not filled with joy to know that you will live forever, after a manner? (Susan Barton, Foe, 58) Of the many literary conventions used to describe JM Coetzee's Foe, one of the more commonly written about is metafiction. Since about 1970, the term metafiction has been used widely to discuss works of post-modern fiction and has been the source of heated debate on whether its employ marks the death or the rebirth of
The distinction between metafiction and meta-metafiction can be seen in a comparison of the beginnings of two metafictional texts: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962). Traveller exemplifies the metafictional mode of writing in what Linda Hutcheon identifies as its “overt” form of self-awareness enacted through its explicit reference to the text’s title (Narcissistic Narrative 7). However, there is no additional degree of commentary about
The Dialectic of Metafiction and Neorealism in Calvino's Baron in the Trees. "I agree to my books being read as existential or as structural works, as Marxist or neo-Kantian, Freudianly or Jungianly: but above all I am glad to see that no one key will open the lock". The above quotation perhaps shows more than anything else the ambiguity of Calvino's works. The obsession to label all narratives arises from our compulsion to make sense of this world, as literary generic categories form part
is typically left asking no questions, and satisfied with the outcome of the previous events. However, in the novel The Things They Carried the setup of the book is quite different. This book is written in a genre of literature called “metafiction.” “Metafiction” is a term given to fictional story in which the author makes the reader question what is fiction and what is reality. This is very important in the setup of the Tim’s writing because it forces the reader to draw his or her own conclusion
Everything in this world has an identity and a meaning. A meaning for why it was created, a meaning for what it is and a meaning for why it is physically where it is. Just take a second to stop and think. Think about all of the objects that are around us every single day. If each one of us is put in the same room and asked to explain what we see, just about all of us will be able to give an explanation. We all will be able to explain what we see, but not every explanation is going to be the same
narrative. Barnes himself is clearly a dictator in the sense that he has control over the content of his own novel, but in this instance, Braithwaite is referring to all fiction. This reference to the production of fiction is a common quality of metafiction, and it recurs frequently in Flaubert's Parrot. The theme is picked up later when Braithwaite says, "Many critics would like to be dictators of literature,... ... middle of paper ... ...out, for example, p. 87. 19 Ibid., throughout, for example
structures and, more importantly, its post-modern counterpart 'metafiction'. Metafiction is already seen in some of Shakespeare's plays, such as Macbeth and Midsummer's Night Dream, and works as a framing device that draws attention to the fact the reader is reading (or watching) a play. It is a regular plot device used to draw highlight the paradoxical nature of the 'framed' and the 'unframed', or as Patricia Waugh says in Metafiction, 'form' and 'content' (2001: 31). The reader or viewer becomes
Don Quijote and the Neuroscience of Metafiction What is metafiction? Its original meaning was "a fiction that both creates an illusion and lays bare that illusion."1 But the term has expanded and expanded to include any fiction that even mentions the idea of fiction. That can cover a lot of things, starting with the Iliad.2 I'd like to go back to the original idea. In my understanding, metafictions tell stories in which the physical medium of the story becomes part of the story. Among contemporary
In telling the story of a sweetheart in the throngs of war, O’Brien knew his audience would need a space where the possibility of this event could have existed. Metafiction allows him to use extensive exaggeration to stress the intensity of Mary Anne’s absorption into violence. This narrative would not have been possible within the constraints of traditional forms of fictions, and O’Brien needed to “swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane” (O’Brien
United States was involved in a war like no other we had ever fought. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes stories that take place before the war, during the war, and after the war. O’ Brien wants to find the true story. O’ Brien uses metafiction, fiction that draws attention to itself as art, to create surreal scenery and humanize many factual occurrences (Wikipedia). As a result of this both story-truth and happening-truth are both present. O ‘Brien relives the war as a storyteller, making
author selected the quest narrative and metafiction. Moreover, the paper focuses on the theme of love reflected in novels and provides an explanation of the representation of love in both of them. The main aim of this paper is to examine shared characteristics of postmodern literature and mainly, the theme of love. Love has many shapes and comes in many forms, so it does in
Metafiction is also referred to as experimental fiction. Consisting of several short stories, the book Fiction was compiled by R.S. Gwynn. The two stories that express what metafiction is: “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood, and “How to Become a Writer” by Lorrie Moore. Moore describes her writing as “recipe fiction” (Gwynn 397). She explains that “recipe fiction” is a “second person, mock-imperative narrative” (Gwynn 397). Metafiction has distinctive attributes and each of the stories effectively
reality versus fiction and belief versus disbelief, O’Brien creates question within the readers understanding of each story. The way he chooses to style and write the different soldiers stories leaves a lot to be imagined by the reader. The use of metafiction in the novel is ultimately what makes it a genius work of art, a “fiction about fiction”. And within this fiction oftentimes the truth is found. In this essay I will...
The reader of a metafiction raises the question-which is the real world? The ontology of “any fiction is justified/validated/vindicated in the context of various theories of representation in the field of literary art and practice. Among these theories the seminal and the most influential is the mimetic theory. The theory of mimesis (imitation) posits that there is a world out there, a world in which we all live and act, which we call “the real world”. What fiction does (for that matter any art)
Metafiction questions the relationship between fiction and reality. It is used as a way to ask the reader what does this fictional story say about reality, without literally stating the question. Challenging thoughts about the reality of the story, Franz Kafka and Danny Santiago are both authors who have utilized this technique. Through the stories the suffrages endured at the hands of art are made visible. “A Hunger Artist”, Franz Kafka, and “The Somebody”, Danny Santiago, are both stories in
Some of the dominant features of postmodern fictions include temporal disorder, the erosion of the sense of time, a foregrounding of words as fragmenting material signs, a pervasive and pointless use of pastiche, loose association of ideas, paranoia and the creation of vicious circles or a loss of destination between separate levels of discourse, which are all symptoms of the language disorders of postmodernist fictions. The postmodern novel may be summed up as: • Late modernism. • Anti-modernism
and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie are works of metafiction. TTTC is a collection of stories detailing Tim O’Brien’s life changing experiences in Vietnam, during the Vietnam War. Balzac is a three-part book, about two teenaged boys, who are sent by the Chinese Government, to re-educate smaller countryside towns, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Sijie’s Balzac, and O’ Brien’s TTTC have three different types of metafiction where the author “comments on the writing;” has come “insolvent
how he came to hear Piscine Molitor Patel’s story. Metafiction is a narrative technique in which the work always includes an awareness within the fiction, that it is a work of fiction. Metafiction generally has the narrator establish themselves as a character in the novel. Breakfast of Champions and Life of Pi both have characters who have a hard time differentiating their perception of their situation and the actual events taking place. Metafiction generally uses a technique where the storyteller