Metafiction in Postmodern Literature
Here's a term that gets tossed around quite a bit.
First used by William H. Gass in a 1970 essay, "Philosophy and the Form of Fiction," the word "metafiction" signals the kind of text that emphasizes its status as a text. Metafiction is 100% aware of the fact that it's fiction—some literature may try to be naturalistic or realistic, but postmodernism doesn't hide what it is.
In fact, it flaunts it.
Metafiction is a prime example of the self-aware vibe we often find in postmodernism. Rather than trying to pass itself off as a window on the world and disguise its structure and techniques, metafiction lays its cards on the table. There are lots of different ways in which authors can create this effect—story-within-a-story, making obvious references to storytelling conventions—but what they have in common is that they call attention to the processes of writing and reading.
This technique started to attract attention in the 1960s when it was used in some classic texts such as John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. It then reached the height of its popularity in the '70s, though some authors (such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace) kept using it in spades. Fast forward to the present, and metafiction has spread out much wider, becoming a major part of pop culture.
Through its references to literary styles and conventions, metafiction gives us another example of postmodernism's bric-a-brac approach. Postmodern literature isn't about creating something 100% new and real—remember, these ideals are no longer seen as possible by postmodernists. Rather than fighting against this, though, postmodernists go with the flow and embrace the idea of writing stories about stories, instead of getting bogged down in a quest for what's authentic or real.
P.S. As an add-on to the concept of metafiction, Linda Hutcheon came up with the term "historiographic metafiction" in 1988. The term describes fictional texts that bring history into the mix—a combo that takes us away from the idea of history as fact and highlights that writers can put their own spin on things (after all, it's history we're dealing with here).
Chew on This
Think metafiction is a 20th-century invention? Think again. Check out Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) for an early slice of self-awareness.
If we're talking metafiction, then it doesn't get more meta than Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night A Traveler (1979). Experimental to the max, it's a prime example of a text that emphasizes its status as a text.