Postmodernism/Metafiction
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation
of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period
(relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable
narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in
Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism
as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the
exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature.
However, unifying features often coincide with Jean-François Lyotard's concept of the "meta-narrative" and "little narrative," Jacques Derrida's concept of "play," and Jean Baudrillard's "simulacra."
For example, instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic
world, the postmodern author eschews, often playfully, the possibility
of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this quest.
This distrust of totalizing mechanisms extends even to the author; thus
postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction
to undermine the author's "univocal" control (the control of only one
voice). The distinction between high and low culture is also attacked
with the employment of pastiche,
the combination of multiple cultural elements including subjects and
genres not previously deemed fit for literature. A list of postmodern
authors often varies; the following are some names of authors often so
classified, most of them belonging to the generation born in the interwar period: William Burroughs (1914-1997), Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984), Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), John Barth (b. 1930), Donald Barthelme (1931-1989), E. L. Doctorow (b. 1931), Robert Coover (1932), Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991) Don DeLillo (b. 1936), Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937), Ishmael Reed (1938), Kathy Acker (1947-1997), Paul Auster (b. 1947)[1], Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952).
Metafiction is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses
the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion. It is the
literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and
systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing
questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually
using irony and self-reflection. It can be compared to presentational
theatre, which does not let the audience forget it is viewing a play;
metafiction does not let the reader forget he or she is reading a
fictional work.
Metafiction is primarily associated with Modernist and Postmodernist literature, but is found at least as early as the 9th-century One Thousand and One Nights and Chaucer's 14th-century Canterbury Tales. Cervantes' Don Quixote is a metafictional novel, as is James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). In the 1950s several French novelists published works whose styles were collectively dubbed "nouveau roman". These "new novels" were characterized by their bending of genre and style and often included elements of metafiction. It became prominent in the 1960s, with authors and works such as John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Robert Coover's The Babysitter and The Magic Poker, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and William H. Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife. William H. Gass coined the term “metafiction” in a 1970 essay entitled “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction”. Unlike the antinovel, or anti-fiction, metafiction is specifically fiction about fiction, i.e. fiction which self-consciously reflects upon itself
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