Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• BOEHM, BETH ANN

Titel

A RHETORIC OF METAFICTION

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1987

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This study is an investigation of the rhetorical processes involved in metafiction--a label for texts that self-consciously flaunt their own processes of construction. The ways in which authors of metafiction seek to alter the relationship between writer, reader, and text, are examined as are the potential rewards, risks, and ideological implications of texts that invite their readers to contemplate the nature of narrative forms and techniques. In addition to exploring the varieties of metafiction, this study seeks to contribute to recent discussions about the reader of fiction. Using Peter Rabinowitz's distinction between the narrative audience and the authorial audience, different types of self-conscious tests are examined to see how each both creates and assumes its audience. Metafiction is frequently called solipsistic, elitist, and unreadable, charges which suggest that author and reader never experience that meeting of minds whose intricacies and processes rhetorical criticism seeks to analyze, but it is argued throughout the study that the use of metafictional techniques does not necessarily make a text unreadable or solipsistic. Instead, by foregrounding for the narrative audience the process by which the text is constructed, metafiction requires the authorial reader to ask different questions about the literary transaction than does mimetic fiction. In this rhetorical genre study, the chapters are loosely organized around the elements of the narrative transaction (author, tale, medium, and reader) emphasized by different writers of metafiction. The second chapter on didactic metafiction (Barth and Borges) focuses on fiction that draws the reader's attention to the author's roles as teacher and performer, while the third (Coover, Barthelme, and Calvino) focuses on different uses of traditional tales. The fourth (Gass and Barthelme) explores metalinguistic techniques, the fifth (Gardner, Puig, and Calvino) focuses on dramatized readers, and the final chapter (Fowles) explores the relationship between mimetic and metafictional techniques. The variety of effects authors achieve by employing metafictional techniques are explored, which, though inherently self-consciuos, are not inherently asocial, elitist, or unreadable. While these techniques make us more self-conscious of our activity as readers, they are nevertheless techniques which can be exploited for many different intentions and used to achieve a variety of effects. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)