Metafiction/Metanarrative

http://lhn.sub.uni-hamburg.de/index.php/Metanarration_and_Metafiction.html (2012)

**Metafiction/Narrafiction/metanarration**

metanarration refers to the narrator’s reflections on the act or process of narration; metafiction concerns comments on the fictionality and/or constructedness of the narrative. Thus, whereas metafictionality designates the quality of disclosing the fictionality of a narrative, metanarration captures those forms of self-reflexive narration in which aspects of narration are addressed in the narratorial discourse, i.e. narrative utterances about narrative rather than fiction about fiction.

Thus, the term is a hypernym denoting all sorts of self-reflective utterances and elements of a fictional narrative that do not treat their referent as apparent reality but instead induce readers to reflect on the textuality and fictionality of narrative in terms of its artifactuality (Wolf 1993: 224).

Metanarrative comments are concerned with the act and/or process of narration, and not with its fictional nature. In contrast to metafiction, which can only appear in the context of fiction, types of metanarration can also be found in many non-fictional narrative genres and media. Metanarrative passages need not destroy aesthetic illusion ([→](http://lhn.sub.uni-hamburg.de/index.php/Illusion_(Aesthetic).html "Illusion (Aesthetic)") Illusion (Aesthetic)), but may also contribute to substantiating the illusion of authenticity that a narrative seeks to create.

all comments which address aspects of narration in a self-reflexive manner as well as the narrator’s references ([→](http://lhn.sub.uni-hamburg.de/index.php/Narrator.html "Narrator") Narrator) to his or her communication with the narratee on the discourse level can be subsumed under the term “metanarration.

**Difference Metafiction and Metanarrative**

Unuse of Metanarrative
Firstly, the term metafiction is so widely used in English for all sorts of anti-illusionistic techniques that forms of metanarration are generally subsumed under this umbrella. in the few contributions in which the term metanarrative is used at all, it is commonly perceived as an English equivalent of _grand récit_ (in Lyotard’s sense) and thus as synonymous with “master narrative”

(Nünning 2004; Fludernik 2003). They have provided a descriptive analysis of different types of metanarration as well as a survey of its changing functions in English novels from the 17th century to the present.

metanarration. The typology is based on four basic aspects, which in turn give rise to subsidiary distinctions: (a) formal; (b) structural; (c) content-related; and (d) reception-oriented types of metanarrative.
**Diegetic** (to research meaning)

To circumvent the potential ambiguity between metanarration and metafiction, she employs the term metanarrative exclusively with regard to self-reflexive statements referring to the discourse and its constructedness and limits the term metafiction to self-reflexive utterances about the inventedness of the story (Fluderik 2003)

**Reception**

metafiction has met with considerable academic interest both as a historical element of (narrative) fiction and as a hallmark of postmodernism
By mirroring their own process of fictional construction, metafictional texts, such as Gabriel García Márquez’s _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ or Italo Calvino’s _If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler_, draw the reader’s attention to the storytelling process and undermine the realism of the narrative.

he functions of metafiction range from undermining aesthetic illusion to poetological self-reflection, commenting on aesthetic procedures, the celebration of the act of narrating, and playful exploration of the possibilities and limits of fiction.

**Metareference**
In recent contributions, Wolf (2009) seeks to increase the transmedial applicability of metafiction by reconceptualizing it in a first step as a non media-specific concept, namely as “metareference.” Metareference denotes a signifying practice that generates a self-referential meaning and actualizes a secondary cognitive frame in the recipient. On this basis, individual media can be examined with respect to their metareferential capacities.

“Metareference across Media: The Concept, its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions.”

**Further Research**

One relatively unexplored issue concerns the development of self-reflexive narrative forms over various periods of literary history, not only in narrative fiction, but also in other genres and media.
In this respect, it would be interesting to provide comparisons between forms of narrative self-reflexivity or self-referentiality in Western and non-Western literature.

E. Aardema