La metanarrativa: le teoria, la storia, i testi

This thesis aims to provide a detailed description, yet not exhaustive, of the presence of the metanarrative in western literature from its very first appearance. The metanarrative refers to the literary process whereby a piece of literature focuses on itself, however numerous definitions of this technique have been given over the course of the years which, at times, have generated a lot of confusion. In my work I have chosen to follow both descriptions given to the phenomenon of the metanarrative by critics in the seventies and eighties of the 20th century. The first is provided by Patricia Waugh in her essay Metafiction, Theory and Practice of Self Conscious Fiction in 1984 and by Linda Hutcheon in Poetics on Postmodernism in 1988. Both literary works underline how the auto‐reflection of the text is really a reflection on the reality of a text and its rhetoric mechanisms and pretences. The second line of thought followed is that provided by the Franco‐American writer Raymond Federman in Surfiction, an essay written in 1975. Federman's view of the metanarrative is that it doesn't always have an exegesis relationship with the structure of the reality, however, at times, it is simply a game, a cultured divertissement which considers its texts out of touch with reality (the name Surfiction contains a clear reference to twenties Surrealism), such texts are completely taken out of the typical structure of the novel and their readability becomes seriously compromised. The content of this thesis is divided into three parts: the first confronts the study of the metanarrative from a historical point of view, highlighting the fact that this phenomenon is not ascribable to only one literary period, on the contrary, it is present in many historic epochs. The metanarrative is however believed to be distinguished in two main epochs, both in the 20th century where it experienced its greatest success; in Europe in the twenties and thirties and in the United States in the sixties and seventies. These two epochs highlight the peculiar characteristics of the metanarrative, forming two different categories. In the first epoch there was a marked interest to enhance the figure of the characters compared to that of the narrator, and this tendency corresponds to new philosophical and political movements in those years. In the second epoch it is not circumscribed as a majority movement but rather as experimental success, different in content and form and mainly directed towards the unveiling, or rather the demonstration of the fiction in the reality. The second part of the thesis is dedicated however to the study of the formalistic materials, highlighting and listing all the techniques of the masters of Structuralism which are not all ascribable to the metanarrative but explain, and at times provoke, its existence. This section has focused mainly on the concept of the death of the author as conveyed by Roland Barthes in 1968, on allegory, the antique rhetoric figure forgotten for centuries which made a come back in the 20th century and is in some way correlated to the concept of simulacra, elaborated by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacres and Simulation in 1981, very important for Postmodernism. The third and final part of the thesis is dedicated to highlighting some examples, pieces of metanarrative texts from those two epochs, mainly drawing attention to the American metanarrative in the sixties and seventies when the metanarrative had a large following. The texts are divided according to the structure used: from “variants of narratology” (those texts which still maintain a certain readability) to “experimental narrative” (where the plot of the texts are completely broken up leaving the reader to put the puzzle back together. The final chapter of the thesis aims to discover which of the metanarratives previously listed have survived into the contemporary western literature.