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Abstract
The purpose of the dissertation is to re-articulate the meaning and critical significance of metafiction, particularly historiographic metafiction and self-reflexive narrative in contemporary American fiction, with particular reference to Don Delillo’s Libra, John Barth’s Letters and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. All three authors are Postmodern American fiction writers who call into question how we know and perceive the past and point to the blurring of the distinction between history and fiction.
This dissertation is divided into four chapters: Chapter One is an overview of the critical views on metafiction as a genre. It reviews the critical literature on metafiction and the rise of American metafiction and its development from the sixties to present. Chapter Two investigates Don Delillo’s Libra (1988) which is a fictionalized account of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. Delillo explores the recording of the assassination history and deals less with historical facts than with the epistemological problems attached to the reconstruction of historical events and to the writing of history. Through sheltering structures, plots and stories Delillo’s historiographic metafiction of Libra is a textualized sense of history that has come to characterize postmodernity. Chapter Three focuses upon John Barth’s Letters which is a
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self-conscious and self-reflexive product of Author Barth to create a novel in which he is rewriting the history of his previous characters, the literary history and his own personal history. Letters integrated within itself a metafictional discussion of its own structure and meaning as well as an account of its own origin. Chapter Four reviews Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. Pynchon’s concern in this book is America’s political situation, corporatism, the tyranny of capitalism, the disintegration of liberalism, and the danger of the development of a new fascism in contemporary America. One of the major themes in Vineland is how difficult and tricky could the transmission of historical knowledge be and he shows how narration about history is problematic not only for the characters but also for him. In Vineland, Pynchon discusses the manipulation of facts and fictions through media that has become the governing principle of contemporary American political life. Vineland offers an assessment of mass culture as capitalism’s most powerful and most important agent.