Date of Award
3-17-2020
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
English, MA
First Advisor
Marcus Tribbett
Committee Members
Elizabeth Chamberlain; Michael Spikes
Call Number
LD 251 .A566t 2019 M29
Abstract
This thesis examines the various functions of self-conscious and self-reflexive narrative such as authorial control over meaning, mutability of history, and ontological exploration/experimentation such as the relationship between fiction and reality. It examines texts from multiple narrative genres and media (novels, comic books/graphic novels, film, and theater) as well as established critical work on metafiction, such as Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, Robert Alter’s Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre, and Linda Hutcheon’s “Historiographic Metafiction” to establish the prototypical characteristics of metafiction. It also discusses the specific ways in which these metafictional practices are manifested within various narrative mediums. Current scholarship fails to address the active role of audiences in metafiction. This thesis concentrates on the ways in which audiences are required to actively engage in narrative construction of metafictional texts in order to interpret the text or derive meaning from it. As a consequence, it also addresses the question of with whom textual authority resides, citing Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” and Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities alongside examples of metafictional practices to argue that audiences are the ultimate interpretive authority.
Rights Management
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Matlock, Jesse, "Metafiction As Anti-Genre Across Narrative Mediums" (2020). Student Theses and Dissertations. 433.
https://arch.astate.edu/all-etd/433
