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Full Description
Metafiction has long been associated with the heyday of literary postmodernism—with a certain sense of irresponsibility, political apathy, or outright nihilism. Yet, if (as is now widely assumed) postmodernism has finally run its course, how might we account for the proliferation of metafictional devices in contemporary narrative media? Does this persistence undermine the claim that postmodernism has passed, or has the function of metafiction somehow changed?
To answer these questions, Josh Toth considers a broad range of recent metafictional texts—bywriters such as George Saunders and Jennifer Egan and directors such as Sofia Coppola and Quentin Tarantino. At the same time, he traverses a diffuse theoretical landscape: from the rise of various new materialisms (in philosophy) and the turn to affect (in literary criticism) to the seemingly endless efforts to name postmodernism's ostensible successor.
Ultimately, Toth argues that much contemporary metafiction moves beyond postmodern skepticism to reassert the possibility of making true claims about real things. Capable of combating a "post-truth" crisis, such forms assert or assume a kind of Hegelian plasticity; they actively and persistently confront the trauma of what is infinitely mutable, or perpetually other. What is outside or before a given representation is confirmed and endured as that which exceeds the instance of its capture. The truth is thereby renewed; neither denied nor simply assumed, it is approached as ethically as possible. Its plasticity is grasped because the grasp, the form of its narrative apprehension, lets slip.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I: Theory
1. Metafiction Contra Postmodernity
Meta After Meta
Irony and the Unpostmodern
From Oscillation to Sublation
Historioplastic Metafiction
One Last Time, Again
2. Speculative Plasticity
Divine Plasticity
Metafictional Subjects
Neomaterialism, or Reading Poorly
Writing Well, or the Ethics of Speculation
Part II: Text
3. The Time of Plascencia and Egan (and Others)
Grasping the Future
Textual Reality
Irony's Ghosts
The Time of EA
4. Undoing Wounds in Danielewski's House of Leaves
Spiraling ClosureTraumatic Absence
Returning "the Real"
"A Snail's Place"?
Recovery without Scars
Part III: Screen
5. Affective Debts in Contemporary Film
Forming History
Affective Interruption
Economimetic Collapse
The Other Account
6. Historioplasticity in Tarantino (and Nolan)
History's Suture
Performance... en Abyme
"Facts, not [Dreams]"
Once Upon a Time... In Conclusion
Works Cited
