Metaliteratura y cultura posmoderna

The intention of this research is to determine the relationship between the proliferation of meta-novels in the last decades and those cultural transformations which have marked the contemporary age. Through a synchronic and diachronic analysis of this literary tendency, we will try to verify in what measure meta-literature is a product of the concerns and anxieties of the postmodern man, and how, on the contrary, it constitutes a stylistic resource which has always been employed in the history of literature. The first part of this work includes a theoretical introduction which analyses the main critical formulations elaborated in the last decades regarding the concepts of metafiction and postmodernism. This analysis leads to a double significance of the concept of metaliterature: on one side, it appears as a typically postmodern literary genre, apt to express the philosophical condition of this cultural age and able to merge nihilism, recreational attitude, recovery of the tradition and experimentalism in one single artistic expression; on the other hand, it constitutes a heterogeneous stylistic and thematic baggage available to the writers of any historical period. In the second part of this study a reduced corpus of novels, published in the last twenty years, has been analyzed with the objective of verifying, in the practice, the relationship between metafictional strategies and postmodernism. Subdivided by a thematic criterion, this stage of the research underlines the importance of the philosophic speculation about the linguistic nature of reality, manifest in novels like El orden alfabético by Juan José Millás or La ciudad ausente by Ricardo Piglia; it analyzes the genre of «autofiction», considered as a postmodern literary product, taking as examples some novels by Javier Cercas, Javier Marías and Enrique Vila-Matas. Finally, two novels by Ricardo Piglia and Javier Cercas are examined again, ascribing them to the genre of historiographic metafiction, emphasising the relationship between narrative self-consciousness and historiographic reflection. The conclusion of this analysis underlines the double nature of the meaning of metaliterature as a post-modern product as well as a literary tendency universally valid. The metafictional strategies represent an instrument through which the authors have faced and overcome the moments of structural crisis in their cultural system. In particular, during the postmodern age, this tendency has reached an unusual popularity, thanks to the ability of many writers who – together with other artists who have exploited the same strategies in other expressive forms – have been able to make use of it and turn it into an expressive paradigm of our culture.