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Date Submitted: 02/23/2013 08:32 AM
Criticising Metafiction: A Story beyond Narrative Craft
By
Paola van Cappellen
3467783
S.J. Cook and S. Domen
Creative Writing
2 Feb. 2012
Contents
Essay Criticising Metafiction: A Story beyond Narrative Craft p. 2
Short Story “The Great Metafictionalist” p. 16
Works Cited p. 26
Criticising Metafiction: A Story beyond Narrative Craft
“Metablog” members maintain daily discussions on metafiction, Media Commons has published a guide to “Metafiction for Children” and even Wikipedia feels confident enough to provide a “List of Metafictional Works”. John Barth would turn in his grave. How did the intricate, dragging monologues from Lost in the Funhouse evolve into books that are appropriate for children? How did what started out as an intellectual exercise preoccupied with being as incomprehensible as possible gain the interest of the masses? And how did a form of writing that profoundly criticises popular fiction turn into its own target of criticism?
According to author David Foster Wallace, metafiction has become as commercial as the earlier written popular works it criticises. In his “Westward the Course of the Empire Takes Its Way” he mocks Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse by creating a story in which the funhouse has become a club with “New and Improved fun” (242), suggesting that what is nowadays called metafiction is a populist, commercialised product. In his essay “E Unibus Pluram”, Wallace explains that by the 90’s postmodernism’s intent, namely “to illuminate and explode hypocrisy” (qtd. Boswell 13) in mass culture by the means of “self-reflection and irony” (Boswell 13), had been applied so frequently by the popular media, for example by television commercials, that it has lost its originally rebellious attitude towards popular culture (Boswell 13). Wallace also argues that this modern form of metafiction is beyond the stage of a creative process and...