SOME POINTS ABOUT METAFICTION
DEFINITION
· Metafiction is simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction.
· Metafiction is a mode of writing within a broader cultural movement often referred to as post-modernism.
· Metafiction draws attention to the process of the re-contextualization that occurs when language is used aesthetically, when language is used playfully.
· All metafiction ‘plays’ with the form of the novel, but not all playfulness in fiction is of the metafictional variety. Metafiction very deliberately undermines a system.
· In fiction, the description of an object brings that object into existence. In the everyday world, the object determines the description.
· Metafiction maintains a finely balanced tension between awareness of its literary-fictional condition and its desire to create imaginative realities, alternative worlds, in which the reader can still become absorbed.
STRUCTURE
· A metafiction novel often begins with an explicit discussion of the arbitrary nature of beginning, of boundaries, and they may end with a sign of the impossibility of ending.
· Any text that draws the reader’s attention to is process of construction by frustrating his or her conventional expectations of meaning and closure problematizes more or less explicitly the ways in which narrative codes artificially construct apparently ‘real’ and imaginary world in the terms of particular ideologies.
· Everything is framed
What is a frame ?
Is it more than the front and back cover of a book ? The only frame of which the reader is sure is the front and back cover the book he is holding.
Analysis of frames involves analysis of the formal conventional organization of novel.
The concept of frame includes Chinese-box structure which context the reality of each individual ‘box’ though a nesting of narrators.
· Parody and inversion are two strategies, which operate in the way of frame-break.
· Characters in fiction are of course, literally signs on a page before they are anything else. Novels are primarily a word of words.
· Parody in metafiction may operate at the level of style or of structure.
· More commonly, metafiction parodies the structural conventions and motifs of the novel itself (as in T S) or of particular mode of that genre.
· In metafiction, the criticism is provided in the work itself by the process which produces the joke or parody, for this method of displacement and substitution carries with it an implicit critical function. Parody in metafiction, despite what is critics might argue, is more than a joke.
· A fictional character both exists and does not exist.
· Through many metafictional novels, characters suddenly realize that they do not exist, cannot die, have never been born, can not act.
· Being or not being ; the fictional characters do not exist until we know who they are. We can refer to them and discuss them.
· Fictional characters may travel in space and time, die and carry on living, murder their authors or have love affairs with them. Some may read about the story of their lives or write a book in which they appear. Sometimes they know what is going to happen to the and attempt to prevent it.
· Names are used to display the arbitrary control of the writer.
· Pretending characters are free can only be a game.
· Fictional characters have no identity outside the script, and do not ultimately have identity within the script. One common metafictional strategy is to present characters who are aware of this condition, and who thus implicitly draw attention to the fictional creation/description paradox.
· Sometimes character believe they are creating their own fictional identity, but the reader always knows that it is being created for them.
· Sarah (the French …) is mythical : she stand outside “history” and “fiction”. She haunts Folwes in his “real” life.
· To play with the relation between story and discourse, a common strategy is to begin a novel in the first person and then to shift to third-person narration and then back again.
· Metafiction novel which shift from the personal form “I” of discourse to the impersonal “he” of story remind the reader that the narrating “I” is the subject of the discourse.
· I do not say “I am going to describe myself”, but “I am writing a text and I call it my name” … I myself am my own symbol. I am the story which happens to me.
EXAMPLES
· « Since I have started thinking about this story, i ve gotten boils, piles, eye strain, stomach spasms, anxiety attacks. »
· « Fuck all this lying look, what I am really trying to write about is not writing about all his stuff “
· When Fowles discusses the facts that these characters he created never existed outside his own mind, the particular reality forced upon the reader is that the character who is the apparent teller of the tale is the inventor and not the recorder of the events that happened.
· Some metafictional novelist makes the reader explicitly aware of his or her role as player. The reader has to choose the ending in the French …
· When the conventions regarding fictive time, for example, are undermined in Tristram Shandy, the novel never gets Under way as an histoire but fictions only as a self regarding discourse which never quite manages to get the story told.
· The basic strategy of the novel (Tristram Shandy) is regarding through incompletion. At all levels of Tristram Sandy, nothing is competed, Walter’s encyclopaedia is never written. The novel begins with a description of the coistus interruptus which brings Tristram into the world. The central narrative is never finished because it is continually punctuated by descriptions of events whose relevance to the main story is apparent only to Tristram himself. Character are repeatedly ‘frozen’ in time, stranded in odd voyeuristic poses at keyholes, or left in strange physical positions.
CONSEQUENCES
· Metafictionnal deconstruction has not only provides novelists and readers a better understanding of the narrative structure, it is also offering a extremely accurate model for understanding the contemporary experience of the world as a construction, an artefact, a web of independent semiotic systems.
· Metafiction, does not abandon ‘the real world’ for the narcissistic pleasure of imagination, it does to re examine the conventions realism in order to discover through its own self reflection – a fictional form that is culturally relevant and comprehensible to contemporary readers. Metafiction help us to understand how the reality we live day by day is similarly constructed, similarly « written ».
· Of course we know that we are Reading is not real, but we suppress the knowledge in order to increase our enjoyment. We tend to read fiction as if it were history.
· Metafiction suggest not only that writing history is a fictional art, but that history itself is invested, like fiction, with interrelating plots which appear to interact independently of human design.
MORE
· Far from « dying » the novel has reached a mature recognition of its existence as writing.
· It is impossible to describe an objective world, because the observer always changes the observed.
· I am the father of the book, the mother is the recorder machine.
· Truth and fiction, is telling stories telling lies ?
· The more the author appear the less he exists.
· The death of the author makes possible the birth of the reader.
· Metafiction is simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction.
· Metafiction is a mode of writing within a broader cultural movement often referred to as post-modernism.
· Metafiction draws attention to the process of the re-contextualization that occurs when language is used aesthetically, when language is used playfully.
· All metafiction ‘plays’ with the form of the novel, but not all playfulness in fiction is of the metafictional variety. Metafiction very deliberately undermines a system.
· In fiction, the description of an object brings that object into existence. In the everyday world, the object determines the description.
· Metafiction maintains a finely balanced tension between awareness of its literary-fictional condition and its desire to create imaginative realities, alternative worlds, in which the reader can still become absorbed.
STRUCTURE
· A metafiction novel often begins with an explicit discussion of the arbitrary nature of beginning, of boundaries, and they may end with a sign of the impossibility of ending.
· Any text that draws the reader’s attention to is process of construction by frustrating his or her conventional expectations of meaning and closure problematizes more or less explicitly the ways in which narrative codes artificially construct apparently ‘real’ and imaginary world in the terms of particular ideologies.
· Everything is framed
What is a frame ?
Is it more than the front and back cover of a book ? The only frame of which the reader is sure is the front and back cover the book he is holding.
Analysis of frames involves analysis of the formal conventional organization of novel.
The concept of frame includes Chinese-box structure which context the reality of each individual ‘box’ though a nesting of narrators.
· Parody and inversion are two strategies, which operate in the way of frame-break.
· Characters in fiction are of course, literally signs on a page before they are anything else. Novels are primarily a word of words.
· Parody in metafiction may operate at the level of style or of structure.
· More commonly, metafiction parodies the structural conventions and motifs of the novel itself (as in T S) or of particular mode of that genre.
· In metafiction, the criticism is provided in the work itself by the process which produces the joke or parody, for this method of displacement and substitution carries with it an implicit critical function. Parody in metafiction, despite what is critics might argue, is more than a joke.
· A fictional character both exists and does not exist.
· Through many metafictional novels, characters suddenly realize that they do not exist, cannot die, have never been born, can not act.
· Being or not being ; the fictional characters do not exist until we know who they are. We can refer to them and discuss them.
· Fictional characters may travel in space and time, die and carry on living, murder their authors or have love affairs with them. Some may read about the story of their lives or write a book in which they appear. Sometimes they know what is going to happen to the and attempt to prevent it.
· Names are used to display the arbitrary control of the writer.
· Pretending characters are free can only be a game.
· Fictional characters have no identity outside the script, and do not ultimately have identity within the script. One common metafictional strategy is to present characters who are aware of this condition, and who thus implicitly draw attention to the fictional creation/description paradox.
· Sometimes character believe they are creating their own fictional identity, but the reader always knows that it is being created for them.
· Sarah (the French …) is mythical : she stand outside “history” and “fiction”. She haunts Folwes in his “real” life.
· To play with the relation between story and discourse, a common strategy is to begin a novel in the first person and then to shift to third-person narration and then back again.
· Metafiction novel which shift from the personal form “I” of discourse to the impersonal “he” of story remind the reader that the narrating “I” is the subject of the discourse.
· I do not say “I am going to describe myself”, but “I am writing a text and I call it my name” … I myself am my own symbol. I am the story which happens to me.
EXAMPLES
· « Since I have started thinking about this story, i ve gotten boils, piles, eye strain, stomach spasms, anxiety attacks. »
· « Fuck all this lying look, what I am really trying to write about is not writing about all his stuff “
· When Fowles discusses the facts that these characters he created never existed outside his own mind, the particular reality forced upon the reader is that the character who is the apparent teller of the tale is the inventor and not the recorder of the events that happened.
· Some metafictional novelist makes the reader explicitly aware of his or her role as player. The reader has to choose the ending in the French …
· When the conventions regarding fictive time, for example, are undermined in Tristram Shandy, the novel never gets Under way as an histoire but fictions only as a self regarding discourse which never quite manages to get the story told.
· The basic strategy of the novel (Tristram Shandy) is regarding through incompletion. At all levels of Tristram Sandy, nothing is competed, Walter’s encyclopaedia is never written. The novel begins with a description of the coistus interruptus which brings Tristram into the world. The central narrative is never finished because it is continually punctuated by descriptions of events whose relevance to the main story is apparent only to Tristram himself. Character are repeatedly ‘frozen’ in time, stranded in odd voyeuristic poses at keyholes, or left in strange physical positions.
CONSEQUENCES
· Metafictionnal deconstruction has not only provides novelists and readers a better understanding of the narrative structure, it is also offering a extremely accurate model for understanding the contemporary experience of the world as a construction, an artefact, a web of independent semiotic systems.
· Metafiction, does not abandon ‘the real world’ for the narcissistic pleasure of imagination, it does to re examine the conventions realism in order to discover through its own self reflection – a fictional form that is culturally relevant and comprehensible to contemporary readers. Metafiction help us to understand how the reality we live day by day is similarly constructed, similarly « written ».
· Of course we know that we are Reading is not real, but we suppress the knowledge in order to increase our enjoyment. We tend to read fiction as if it were history.
· Metafiction suggest not only that writing history is a fictional art, but that history itself is invested, like fiction, with interrelating plots which appear to interact independently of human design.
MORE
· Far from « dying » the novel has reached a mature recognition of its existence as writing.
· It is impossible to describe an objective world, because the observer always changes the observed.
· I am the father of the book, the mother is the recorder machine.
· Truth and fiction, is telling stories telling lies ?
· The more the author appear the less he exists.
· The death of the author makes possible the birth of the reader.
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