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AbstractElaborating on Barthes’ famous distinction, this article examines the relationship between the writerly and the readerly in Abe Kazushige’s novel Individual Projection (Indivijuaru purojekushon). The ‘writerly’ (scriptible) designates an open-ended, playful narrative, giving free rein to the interpretation of the reader who thus becomes a co-writer of the text. The readerly (lisible), by contrast, implies authority and redundancy: it imposes a meaning or message, thus turning the reader into a consumer rather than producer of the text. I argue that Abe’s novel is built upon an internal tension between the openness of the writerly and the more assertive and ethical message of the readerly. The first two parts of this essay focus on the writerly side of the text. Individual Projection could be first described as a parody (1. Political Utopia and Genre fiction as Parody in Individual Projection): through its unreliable narrator, the novel toys with stereotypes associated with political utopia and genre fiction. Such distancing with clichés destabilises the text and opens a free space of interpretation for the reader (2. Metafiction as Writerly Text: When the Reader Writes). Yet, the novel ends with a final metatextual reversal which reshapes our understanding of the story and redefines the reader’s own relationship to the text (3. Metafiction: Revenge of the Author?). This end illustrates the paradoxical nature of metafiction in its relationship to the reader: its apparent semantic openness can also be a means to assert the author’s authority over the text to convey a theoretical or philosophical message. Here, my own understanding of Individual Projection challenges Azuma Hiroki’s interpretation of Abe’s novel. Azuma saw in the openness of Individual Projection another illustration of his own theory both describing and advocating a free consumption of fiction, relying much more on the logic of recycling and recombination than on the linear path of the plot. If Azuma’s interpretation sheds interesting light on the agency devoted to the reader in Individual Projection, it yet fails to apprehend the potentially critical message of the text: Abe’s novel also suggests a pessimistic view of contemporary’s hyperreality which seems quite antithetical to Azuma’s own eulogy of postmodernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the eschatological influence of the American desert on the metanarrative structure of Tanguy Viel's novel La Disparition de Jim Sullivan (2013). Dwayne, the character en abyme, fantasizes about desert adventures but as he progresses towards the arid place, the boundaries between the two diegetic levels vanish. The notion of hyperreality, pervading the novel, reflects Dwayne's ethnocentric posture. He is absorbed in his fantasies and unable to contemplate his environment without artifice. Bearing on the notion of desertification, I demonstrate that the desert, long considered an empty space to be filled, reclaims its rights over humanity with agency. In the last chapter, Dwayne commits suicide in the desert, and the arid place absorbs the character in its turn. The desert is no longer perceived as an archaic space of un-culture, but as the new place where anxieties about the future of humankind crystallize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article unpacks the creative practices of Han Shaogong (b. 1953), focusing on his 1996 masterwork Maqiao Cidian. I draw on the discourse of metalinguistic awareness and language play from the field of developmental psychology, coining the term metalinguistic play to interrogate the layers of language consciousness inscribed into the structure and fabric of Han’s fiction. This article analyzes Han’s novel through the lens of metalinguistic play, considering the creation of a fictive fangyan as a highly sophisticated form of language play that mimics the joy and exuberance of childhood language games. The lexicon-novel demonstrates how linguistic experimentation and formal experimentation are intertwined. The lens of metalinguistic play allows us to reassess Han’s mischievous fabrication of fangyan that is all too often taken at face value, despite (or perhaps because of) his use of a semi-autobiographical narrator. What happens when we consider Han not as a dutiful compiler of linguistic truths but as an inventor of a spurious local fangyan? I unpick the relationship between Han’s morphological play and the self-referential fictionality that has come to be associated with his work, exploring how his metalinguistic play is intimately bound with the experience of being a zhiqing (educated youth). His penchant for metafiction even applies to the process of fabricating a local fangyan, with the character Long Stick Xi’s devious practice of metalinguistic play serving as a blueprint for the novel itself. I conclude by considering how readers draw on their own syntactic awareness to engage with Han’s novel, before offering examples of other authors in the Chinese-speaking world and beyond who engage in metalinguistic play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper critically analyzes the fictional representation of historical events and individual experiences in the pre-and post-independence India in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) in the light of postmodernist theory. It examines how the novel demonstrates an intricate relationship between history and individual and question and subvert the underpinnings of Indian history in order to provide a more complex, multiethnic, multilingual, pluralistic, and heterogeneous image of the nation's history, culture, identity, and tradition. With its selfreferential, self-reflexive, subversive, transgressive, and meta-historical narrative, the novel destabilizes the absolute, authentic, and holistic historical real, truth, knowledge or identity which are represented by dominant power and knowledge systems i.e. 'metanarrative.' In problematizing the traditionally received and unquestionable version of historical truth preoccupied with a single and dominant perspective with universal meaning or truth, Rushdie's postmodern novel redefines history, providing an alternative historical truth by fusing historical with the individual. The prime focus of the paper is to unravel the problematic relations between history and fiction and the fusion of them which are represented from a diverse and multiple experiences or perspectives. By critiquing liberal humanistic approach and deconstructing, Rushdie's postmodern novel offers a fictionalized version of Indian history from the perspective of the marginal with its emphasis on cross-cultural mélange, liberal democratic values, diversity, plurality, multiethnicity, hybridity, and fluidity. The protagonist Saleem situates himself in a contemporary globalized world and opens himself to the possibility of the cross-cultural, mongrelized, and different versions of history of the country. His unreliable narrative dismantles the claims of pure, monolithic and authentic version of historical reality and emphasizes the paradigms of the decentred, fragmented, and pluralized notions of Indian culture, custom, language, religion, identity, and ethics. His postmodern narrative tends to historicize fiction and individualize history. It questions history and simultaneously makes a sense of historical events or reality. The history of the nation is individualized and fictionalized in which the interplay between individual self and collective self, history and fiction, private and public life and past and present are intertwined and integrated and dynamic and fluid in ironical, ambiguous, and ludicrous ways. The postmodern theoretical approach is used in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of eHumanista is the property of Professor Antonio Cortijo-Ocana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Universum is the property of Instituto de Estudios Humanisticos Juan Ignacio Molina, Universidad de Talca and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Universum is the property of Instituto de Estudios Humanisticos Juan Ignacio Molina, Universidad de Talca and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article reads Clarice Lispector's short story "A menor mulher do mundo" in dialogue with decolonial anthropological thought and performance studies to explore the role literature might play in unsettling the colonial paradigm of ethnographic knowledge. I propose that Lispector's text simultaneously hails its reader as a discoverer or ethnographer and undermines the epistemological privilege of this position. Beyond recriminating the reader for their implication in violent othering practices, the text points to the performative nature of what Dianna Taylor calls the "scenario of discovery," revealing discoverer and discovered, ethnographer and native informant to be roles rather than essential identities. Lispector thus questions the unidirectionality of the colonialist gaze and asserts that its "object" not only looks back with its own desires but also makes faces to disarm this fetishizing gaze. The stakes of this reading extend to debates about World Literature and Lispector's place in it, suggesting that the performative capacities of literary language have an important role to play in governing, even checking, the consumption, assimilation, and canonization of literature from the formally colonized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“I’ve read you right—I’m with you now”: Aesthetic Reading in Virginia Woolf’s Metafictional Short Stories. Despite critical interest in Virginia Woolf’s intense preoccupation with the imaginative process at the root of literary creation, little attention has been paid to the manner in which, through metafiction, the writer turns her short stories into reflections upon the nature of reading. In works such as “An Unwritten Novel” (1921) and “The Lady in the Looking-Glass. A Reflection” (1926), the boundaries between literature and criticism, between fiction and reality, take center stage and it is precisely this point of convergence that metafictional works take as subject matter. Thus, Virginia Woolf’s ‘character-reading’ makes its way into her stories and the author’s critical stance upon the act of reading, revealed primarily in her essays, is now transmitted thematically through characters who appropriate the readers’ active construction of meaning while living in the same textual world inhabited by the fictitious characters they ardently wish to interpret. Through the advancement of a specific type of reading: active, emotive, empathetic, fluid, inquisitive, intimate and indeterminate, yet always close to the text it is engaged with, Virginia Woolf may be said to prefigure the type of transactional reader-response criticism underpinned by Louise Rosenblatt, whose insistence upon aesthetic reading calls for a two-way transmission of meaning that is simultaneously constitutive of the literary work and of the reader’s self. „Te-am citit bine—sunt cu tine acum”: lectură estetică în povestirile metaficționale ale Virginiei Woolf. În ciuda interesului critic față de preocuparea intensă a Virginiei Woolf pentru procesul imaginativ care stă la baza creației literare, s-a acordat puțină atenție modului în care, prin metaficțiune, scriitoarea își transformă povestirile în reflecții asupra naturii lecturii. În opere precum „Un roman nescris” (1921) și „Doamna din oglindă”. O reflecție” (1926), în centrul atenției se află granițele dintre literatură și critică, dintre ficțiune și realitate. Pentru Mark Currie, tocmai acest punct de convergență este subiectul abordat în operele metaficționale. Astfel, ceea ce Virginia Woolf numește „citirea personajului” își face loc în povestirile sale, iar poziția critică a autoarei asupra actului lecturii, dezvăluită în primul rând în eseurile sale, este transmisă tematic prin personaje care își însușesc construcția activă a cititorilor în timp ce trăiesc în aceeași lume textuală populată de personajele fictive pe care doresc cu ardoare să le interpreteze. Prin avansarea unui anumit tip de lectură: activă, emotivă, empatică, fluidă, curioasă, intimă și nedeterminată, dar întotdeauna apropiată de textul-bază, se poate spune că Virginia Woolf prefigurează tipul de critică tranzacțională a cititorului susținută de Louise Rosenblatt, a cărei insistență asupra lecturii estetice încurajează o transmitere bidirecțională a sensului, în același timp constitutivă operei literare și sinelui cititorului. Cuvinte-cheie: Virginia Woolf, metaficțiune, lectură estetică, povestire, critica cititorului, Louise Rosenblatt Article history: Received 1 March 2024; Revised 27 June 2024; Accepted 01 September 2024; Available online 30 September 2024; Available print 30 September 2024.

Lance Olsen is author of more than 30 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, the novels Skin Elegies [Olsen, Lance. 2021. Skin Elegies. Ann Arbour, MI: Dzanc] and Always Crashing in the Same Car [Olsen, Lance. 2023. Always Crashing in the Same Car. Tuscaloosa, AL: FC2, University of Alabama]. His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies.. A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, two-time N.E.A. Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. This interview is a dialogue about the blurring of fiction and non-fiction, creative writing's place and role in the twenty-first Century, and Olsen's commitment to experimental writing and his use of processes, concepts and ideas to subvert what many regard as traditional writing and storytelling. It also considers how narrative can be deconstructed, reconfigured, re-constructed and re-invigorated; the possibilities and ethics of remix and appropriation; the failures of mainstream publishing; and how we can or might represent our complex and confusing lives on the page. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of the sexual revolution that the world was undergoing and of the textual experimentation that literature was undertaking in the late 1960s, the silence of the female characters populating Victorian fiction became nothing less than audible – the source of the debate around the ‘sexual/textual politics’ to have dominated the end of the twentieth century. With The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles gives a voice to his central character, Sarah Woodruff, and, in so doing, constructs a woman who deconstructs the (predominantly male) canon. Moreover, the novelist weaves her tale into his story and thus builds successive layers of fictionality for the interrogation of outmoded patterns of thought and the associated narrative strategies – symptomatic for the late Victorian era, yet lingering in the mindset of readers a century later. To illustrate the general postmodern ‘dis-ease’ with tradition and the particular subversive manner in which Fowles challenges expectations, the present study lays focus on the cultural production of early Neo-Victorian novels, highlights parody and metafiction as recurrent modes of writing, with frequent incursions into text, context, and intertext.

Copyright of RumeliDE Journal of Language & Literature Research / RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of RumeliDE Uluslararasi Hakemli Dil & Edebiyat Arastirmalari Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article analyses Mohamed Berrada's novel Luʿbat al-nisyān (1987, The Game of Forgetting, 1996), focusing on the book's unorthodox narrative design, where multiplicity, metafiction, and fragmentation are strategic tools that bring to light the author's vision of (post)modernist literature in a postcolonial nation. The article examines how the novel's compelling experimental quality and efficacious engagement of cultural and socio-political issues are at work, highlighting thereby the text's commitment overtones. The novel embeds narrative multiplicity and fragmentation within a key dialectic that informs and runs through the entire text: remembering and forgetting. These two acts (remembering and forgetting) provide discursive spheres that enhance the imagination of both the author and the reader, who enter into an unspoken partnership to take the literary text into vast interpretive realms, thus expanding and elevating the horizons of contemporary Moroccan and Arabic literature. Overall, Berrada resorts to quintessentially (post)modernist techniques – such as multiplicity, fragmentation, and metanarrative – anchored in the overarching game/dialectic of remembering and forgetting in order to deliver implicit social and political critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the representation of emotions in the poetry of John Ash with a focus on his collection entitled Two Books: The Anatolikon/To the City (2002). Through an in-depth analysis of selected poems, the study explores Ash's encounters with ancient Greek cities, the impact of migration, and the use of metafiction. The study also considers Ash's portrayal of historical events and the attribution of emotions to ancient cities and highlights his role as a semihistorian. Furthermore, it examines the relationship between emotions and thoughts and traces its origins to the emergence of Romanticism and the shift in the literature from strict rationality to the reliance on emotions. Within these compositions, his personas manage the preservation and history of ancient cities that pose historical significance in the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires and Armenia in poetry. Intentionally obfuscating the differentiation between reality and history, Ash invites readers to navigate the dynamic interplay between the plain present and the echoes of an ancient era. Positioned within the history of British poetry, Ash is recognized as a contemporary postmodern poet. A dualistic approach characterizes his poetic works in which one facet is marked by the emotive expressions of his speakers, particularly regarding the antiquated urban landscapes they visit. His philosophical musings on poetics, history, and poetry mark the other facet of his poetry. This study aims to examine Ash's postmodern inclinations in light of his utilization of emotions and ideas in the poems of Two Books: The Anatolikon/To the City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article takes a closer look at the intricate relationship between modernism and postmodernism, specifically exploring the concept of time in the postmodern literary text using Alasdair Gray's novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books as a case study. The analysis of the treatment of time in the postmodern novel reveals a departure from linear chronology. Such a departure is achieved through the postmodern characters of the novel, particularly Duncan Thaw and Lanark, who become vessels for the exploration of temporal dimensions. In addition, the narrative structure, characterized by fragmentation and unconventional sequencing, support the non-linearity of time. The article also discusses the intertextuality of time, considering the relationships between past, present, and future within the novel's realistic, fantastical and dystopian settings. Thus, the examination of Lanark unfolds as a postmodern exploration of temporal fluidity, challenging conventional notions of time and inviting readers to reconsider their understanding of temporal progression. In doing so, the article contributes to the broader discourse on postmodern literature and its innovative approaches to temporal representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores Postmodernism elements in the short story "The Other Death" by one of the renowned postmodern authors Jorge Luis Borges. The researchers have identified the elements of postmodernism in the story to substantiate the claim that the story is a postmodern text. The study is exploratory in nature and involves the use of the qualitative approach. Moreover, the study has been carried out and analyzed under the lens of Postmodernism. For this purpose, the study uses content analysis of the Jorge Luis Borges short story "the Other Death. For the current study, the researchers have invoked the theory of postmodern fiction mentioned in The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction by Bran Nicol. This research study has used the interpretative method to analyze the text of "The Other Death". Content analysis has been widely used through the lens of postmodernism of literary texts. The findings of the study have shown that the story carries many postmodern elements but the major elements explored by researchers are: Intertextuality, Metafiction, and Magical Realism. The short story is intertwined with diverse rich elements to represent diverse meaning for the readers. The text carries literary allusions and the commendatory of the author as well along with the elements of magical realism that makes it a well-knit text for postmodern analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Poligramas is the property of Universidad del Valle and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines Thai author Prabda Yoon's Basement Moon , a 2018 science fictional novel that embodies the belief that art and science can play a vital role in triggering critical consciousness that keeps alive the spirit of dissent. A close reading of the novel also reveals that it mirrors several key concepts and ideas promoted by Gramsci pertaining to power relations between the ruling class and those under them and the educational roles of art and science. Of great significance is that this novel is exemplary of an innovative mode of political fiction in its employment of key posthumanist ideas that challenge human aspiration for absolute power and control. In discussing Basement Moon , I draw on Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony as well as relevant literature in dystopia, posthumanism and metafiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I trace aesthetic and cultural-historical interactions between phenomena of the British Gothic literature and German Dark Romanticism in terms of cultural transfer. Focus of the study is the analysis of E. T. A. Hoffman’s novel The Devil’s Elixirs juxtaposed to Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk. Works by Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Friedrich Schiller, Carl Grosse, and others outline their Gothic context. The analysis traces the interplay of the verbal, the fantastic and the visual codes in the two novels and their synaesthetic interlocking, characteristic of the German author. The comparison includes characters and plot, intertextual, generic, ethical, and other aspects in Hoffmann’s and Lewis’s novels. Along with the Gothic, elements of the Bildungsroman and the Trivialroman are highlighted in The Elixirs. Also the motive of the double and instances of metafiction are analyzed in it. Critical works by E. Blackall, L. Doležel, R. Godal, M. Foucault, T. Todorov, and others were applied in my writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text is dedicated to the novels of Salman Rushdie, one of the world's novelists of the third millennium, who preserve the importance and significance of postmodern fiction. Different novels from different decades are presented that employ a variety of postmodern practices and forms such as intertextuality, metafiction, heteroglossia, remitification, parody and the grotesque. The author builds a colorful world in which images and plots from the dynamic present, but also historical and mythological creatures and heroes are intertwined. Main attention is focused on the novel Quixote, which follows the lives of the fictional Quixote and Sancho in the very real American world. With a colorful palette of fantastic creatures, but also real characters from different eras, the author raises pressing issues about racism, consumer gluttony and obsession with the media spectacle. A brief review of the latest novel, Victory City, with which the author returns to India, building a magical, magnetic, fairy-tale world in which „the conventions of the outside world lose their meaning and melt away”, but at the same time references are made to reality. In conclusion, the importance of Salman Rushdie as a global and postmodern author is reaffirmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies a counterforce in contemporary political discourse which challenges academic tendencies toward pessimism and cynicism with a political posture of hopefulness. Locating in the politically active science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin a similar impulse to this counterforce, this paper argues for using Le Guin's works in the college Rhetoric or English classrooms to model a means to engage with social and political injustice from a position built on hope and not cynicism. Tracking Le Guin's use of metafictional commentary on the process of both reading and writing science fiction, this paper ultimately locates a challenge to our pinched views of human potential and social possibilities in the way of meaningful political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While postmodern metafiction (or reflexive fiction) is commonly positioned outside the scope of the Ontological Turn due to metafiction's association with postmodernism's insistence on "world as text," this article argues that metafiction's proximity to scientific theories of reflexivity engenders a shift toward what the article calls body as text, a shift that is synchronous with reflexivity's evolution from cybernetics to biological autopoiesis. To trace metafiction's aesthetic evolution from world as text to body as text, the article examines Jorge Luis Borges's short story "The Circular Ruins" (1940) alongside early-order cybernetic theories of reflexivity before examining Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper (2005) alongside later theories of biological autopoiesis. While both narratives demonstrate an interest in the world-building powers of the text, the article argues that Plascencia's novel demonstrates reflexivity's autopoietic ability to examine the interstitial relationship between material embodiment and nonhuman agencies. By moving away from Borgesian self-regulation toward self-assembly, The People of Paper gradually sheds the epistemological preoccupations of its world-as-text aesthetic in favor a more ontological body-as-text aesthetic, thereby opening up the possibility of interpreting Plascencia's novel as an aestheticization not of the construction of reality but of the construction of the body itself. In marking a distinction between world-as-text metafiction and body-as-text metafiction, the latter emerges as a uniquely useful heuristic in the Ontological Turn for modeling molecular embodiment and nonhuman agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dariyāft is the property of National University of Modern Languages and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the intricate relationship between B.S. Johnson’s novel “Albert Angelo” and Beckett’s “The Unnamable”, both dealing with the issue of the possible presence of the author in his own text. The point of departure for such comparison is Johnson’s incorporation, as an epigraph, of a passage taken from Beckett’s novel. Such passage, intended rather literally by the British author, is employed as a justification not only for the central device at the heart of his novel, but also in support of a larger aesthetic project which will characterise a great part of his oeuvre – which famously stresses the importance of ‘truth’, as opposed to fabulation, and the necessity of the author’s direct presence in his texts. This contribution, in particular, tries to reconstruct the history of Johnson’s involvement with Beckett’s work, demonstrating how Johnson has in fact distorted the master’s message – perhaps intentionally – in order to produce a rather different model of literature, despite moving from very similar premises.

In order to confirm how the presence of the past and the calling of History can be considered characteristics of contemporary novel, as well as the exploring of the “historical possibilities”, we will focus on some aspects of The History of the Siege of Lisbon related to temporal simultaneity or undefinition, efabulation as history’s rewriting, narrator as a decentred authority, etc.

The intention of this article is to study Paul Auster’s novel Invisible (2009) as an exercise in metafiction and a poststructuralist game in which Auster introduces different fictional layers to make the figure of the author disappear. Auster presents the story of Adam Walker and Rudolph Born, two characters who become antagonists but whose lives depend on each other. By a series of narrations, the novel tells how the story of these two characters extends in time, challenging literary genres and multiplying different narrative layers.

This article examines epigenetic relations through the study of "blankness" in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000). The novel's experimental form, as well as the eponymous House on Ash Tree Lane, provide particularly productive models for envisioning the structural and mutative agency of immaterial relations responsible for epigenesis, or the molecular signals that alter genetic expression. To examine the agency of blankness as it applies across literary theory and epigenesis, this essay borrows from science studies, new materialisms, biosemiotics, new formalisms, and Derridean deconstruction to offer an interdisciplinary hermeneutics deemed "epigenetic formalism" by which to better conceive of a network—whether biological or literary—whose form absorbs its environmental milieu via the agency of blankness. In this way, examining epigenesis alongside House of Leaves allows for crucial insight into the relationality and formal composition of the human genome, as well as insight into the relationality and composition of forms in a literary text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid changes in the context and condition of historical practice (technological, institutional, theoretical) invite practicing historians to entertain experimental techniques for engaging the past: for teaching students; for investigating archives; and for presenting the results of historical inquiry. The authors introduce a form of historically oriented research and writing that shows promise as a way of encouraging genuine immersion in the specificity and alterity of the past. This 'metahistorical' mode, which engages with historical fiction, but also with traditions of rigorous scholarly research, offers a powerful means by which to cultivate historical consciousness, and to promote imaginative historical practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to analyse the symbology in the metaficcional universe created by Juan José Millás in Que nadie duerma (2018). First, it will analyse the writer’s narrative as part of his generation and focalising on the novel concept and the new literary movements in the last years such as autofiction, metafiction or neonovela. Then, we will study Que nadie duerma in three sections: familiar heritage of the protagonist and avian symbology within the narrative universe and her traumatic childhood. Secondly, the study of interartistic metaficcional games created by Juan José Millás and the existentialist inspiration (life as theatre, Calderón de la Barca), the fight of real versus fiction and the doubtfulness of the being. To sum up, we will analyse the cathartic ending as closure of his metafictional world.

This introduction to the special issue on Percival Everett provides a general overview of his work for new readers and then discusses it in terms of metafiction and play, focusing especially on his 2022 novel Dr. No. The text concludes with brief summaries of the essays contained in the special issue.

This article explores the concept of frame theory and its relevance in understanding works of literature and art which feature devices traditionally associated with metafiction but which paradoxically avoid purely self-referential modes. By highlighting their aesthetic frames, these works invite audiences to engage in an artistic exchange that collapses the critical distance often associated with conceptual art in favor of a more immersive experience with the work, the artist, or the reality beyond the frame. A new term derived from ongoing research in frame theory, “frame transcendence,” provides a more satisfactory categorization of such works which historically have been incorporated into the realm of “meta-art”. By examining the work of David Foster Wallace and select works in the visual arts previously labeled as “metapainting,” the article seeks to demonstrate that this new categorization resolves critical problems that result when art simultaneously draws attention to its frame and to the authenticity of experience.

This article analyzes the fictional production of Julián Fuks from the perspective of metafiction, placing his literary work in the broad spectrum of aesthetic possibilities offered by literary contemporaneity and, later, by inserting it in the context of postmodernist fiction, highlighting some of the main metafictional procedures of his novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the most popular hagiographies throughout Eastern and Coptic Christianity, Athanasius' Life of Antony has exercised profound influence upon Western visual and literary art, not least Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister. Querying the alleged originality of Nabokov's "symbol of the Divine power," this article examines Nabokov's engagement with the Antonian hagiographic tradition—represented by Athanasius' Life , Hieronymus Bosch's Triptych of the Temptation of St. Anthony , and Gustave Flaubert's Le Tentation de saint Antoine —to reveal the religious ground of protagonist Adam Krug's saint-like identity and the novel's metaliterary mysticism in the Lord's figural descent upon an inclined beam of light at the end of Antony's temptations. Providing a transgressive theological terroir for Nabokov to probe the porous varieties of the real, the Antonian sources of Krug's "haloed hallucination" invite further reconsideration of Nabokov's self-styled "indifference" to the Christian imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Soletras is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Postmodern literature is noticeable for different literary style and approaches. For this reason, postmodernist novelists use legendary stylistic practices like intertextuality, metafiction, and parody etc., for uniqueness and diversity. The paper tends to demonstrate the various elements used by William Golding in his novel „Lord of the Flies?. Golding was a British prominent novelist, who was awarded Nobel Prize in 1983 for his literary distinctiveness. His novel is about boys who are beached on an unknown island and then they reveal their nature. Some remain civilized while others become brutal. The author has written it in the scenario of World War II. Firstly, this paper attempts to investigate the presence of parody and its playfulness, intertextuality, metafiction, and magical realism in Golding?s novel „Lord of the Flies?. Secondly, it further reviews to reveal that how the novelist has involved the reader in the story and impact of his techniques on them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos de Filología Clásica: Estudios Latinos is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In her influential work Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, Waugh (1984) loosely categorizes literary metafiction on a sliding scale of four metafictional Acts. Through repeated readings of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll & Tenniel, 1866) and study of all of Wonderland editions across time, I noted that artists move the book across Waugh's scale of Acts through the visual narrative of illustration. In the essay that follows, I trace the development of metafiction in Wonderland by curating (Persohn, 2018, 2021) a collection of illustrations across time that demonstrates turning points and exemplars of how the book has evolved from the simplest forms of metafiction in Carroll and Tenniel's first edition to radical metafiction in more recent illustrators' works. This evolution evokes ontological questions about the thin distinctions between fiction and reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article considers two metafictional novels published at the end of the 20th century against the background of cognitive literary studies. The formal features of the novels are discussed with a view to the way they defamiliarize various concepts: fiction itself, consciousness, memory, science, art, reading, the internet, artificial intelligence, etc. The novels' attempts at fostering a dialogue between fiction and the humanities, on the one hand, and science and technology, on the other, are mirrored by the reader's vacillation between engagement and detachment and the effects of the texts' self-reflexivity on the reader's mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metafiction emphasises a text's fictionality by drawing the reader's attention to how texts create meaning through numerous textual devices. This paper examines translations of the postmodern picturebook The Incredible Book Eating Boy (2006) by Oliver Jeffers. It compares the original English text to its Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese translations across verbal translation, visual and verbal-visual interactions, specifically focusing on metafictive devices. Using Gideon Toury's model for descriptive translation analysis indicates that socio-cultural contexts influence preliminary norms and are closely related to operational norms applied by both translators and publishing houses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]