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Document Type

Review

Abstract

[First paragraph]

In Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, Linda Hutcheon defines metafiction as a type of “fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity” (1). She chooses the adjective “narcissistic” to describe the “textual self-awareness” of narratives (1). She refers to the negative commentary on metafiction in the early 1970s and the following defense of it; she believes that both trends have gone wrong (2). She states that if today metafiction is not defended anymore, it is because this type of fiction has a “name” which is both “comforting” and castrating” (2). She indicates that in the seventies, self-conscious texts were known as post-modernist ones. Surprisingly, to Hutcheon, the term “post-modernism” is too “limiting” to include the vast scope of metafiction (2). She believes that postmodernism is “an extension of modernism and a reaction to it” (2). She agrees with Barth, Graff, and Alter who consider post-modern self-reflexive texts to be a continuation of modernistic techniques (3). However, she states that the kind of fiction Barth describes as post-modernist is just one type of metafictional fiction (3). She argues that most discussions concerning “the causes of the flourishing self-consciousness” are related to psychological, philosophical, ideological, or social issues, but she prefers to limit her analysis to “textual forms of self-consciousness” (3-4). She states that the realization that “[r]eading and writing belong to the processes of ‘life’ as much as they do to those of ‘art’”, establishes “one side of the paradox of metafiction for the reader”. The other side is that the reader has to “acknowledge the artifice, the ‘art’ of what he is reading”. Furthermore, “as a co-creator”, he is asked “for intellectual and affective responses comparable in scope and intensity to those of his life experience” (5). The two methodologies she mostly makes use of in this book, as she says, are Saussurian structuralism and Iserian hermeneutics because metafiction focuses upon “linguistic and narrative structures” and “the role of the reader” (6). She points to the discussion of the “functions of the reader” by hermeneutic critics such as Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarden who talk of the reader’s concretization of the text and his “thematized” and “actualized” role within the text (6).

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