Metafiction

The relationship between fiction and reality is blurred. We are forced to acknowledge that what we are reading is not reality yet at the same time it feels like reality because the author is addressing us the reader.

Metafiction focuses on the construction of meaning not the representation of meaning, this shows us how the text we are reading is constructed, we are made fully aware that we are being manipulated by the media; we are ourselves both controlled and constructed just as the novel is.

Critics and Authors

• Jean Baudrillard
• John Barth - Lost in the funhouse
• Michael Drolet
• Michel Foucault
• Jacques Derrida
• Jean-Francois Lyotard
• Fredric Jameson
• Phillip K Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
• Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber
• Manuel Puig - Kiss of the Spider woman
• Linda Hutcheon

Introduction to Postmodernism

There is great difficulty in providing a specific definition of the term postmodernism. The difficulty lies in the fact that most definitions tend to define what postmodernism is not rather than what it is. There is also the issue that almost every literary critic differs in their definition of the term. 

Below are some of the definitions used by leading literary theorists:

• Postmodernism can be defined as a mode of thought or a strategy that as Jameson notes is the 'cultural dominant' of the late 20th century.

• Postmodernity is then defined as as a historical epoch ( 1960's-present) and/or social reality marked by late capitalism, globalisation, advanced technology and the media. Drolet in The Postmodern Reader states that 'Postmodernity and the postmodern are the sociological and historical expressions of postmodernism' (Drolet (2004:123), The Postmodern Reader

(Moe's definition of Postmodern - 'Weird for the sake of weird')