Parodic Metafiction and Nostalgic Metafiction: Towards a Conceptual Expansion of the Self-reflexive Narrative Mode

Atenas

Conferencia; International Conference on Literature, Languages & Linguistics; 2008

Athens Institute for Education and Research

The major concern of this paper is to review the concept of metafiction or narrative self-reflexivity, as initiated by several critics, such as Altieri (1972-3), Klinkowitz (1975/80/85), Scholes (1979), Barth (1982), Waugh (1984), Hutcheon (1980/85/88/95), and Sukenick (1985). Some questions derived from close reading and analysis of critical corpora related to the themes of parody and nostalgia (among these, Davis 1979, Hutcheon 1998, Pickering and Keightley 2006) may help enter and interrogate a narrative and some of its thematic implications from these two broad dimensions that a metafictional production may reveal. They might as well be taken as a basis to set up collation modules of textual analysis, from which some more defining features can be drawn to characterize metaficcionality. Following some of the ideas posited by McHale (1992), we can put forward the hypothesis that metafiction is not exclusively a postmodern mode of writing but, rather, an experimental style or tendency that incorporates specific rhetorical devices and that has been used in different ages, for different purposes and in works that may not even be considered fully metafictional. In attempting to add other layers to this mode of writing, we may not only expand this intricate tendency but we may also be able to glimpse at some of the means through which metafictional writers have addressed the absurdity of life and of human condition across time. Some of these concepts will be marginally connected with fictional works by Cervantes Saavedra (1604-14), Sterne (1759-67), Fowles (1969), Coover (1969/77), and Pynchon (1973), among others