Toward a Semiotics of Metafiction: Narrative, Narration, and Postmodern Parody

DOI: 10.5176/2251-3566_L31261

Authors: Michael Heitkemper-Yates

Abstract: This paper represents an attempt to account for theepistemologically indeterminate nature of metafiction and itsdeliberate destabilization of its own ontological and linguisticsystems. Through an analysis of the parodic mechanism ofmetafiction, its semiotic structure, and its relationship to myth,this paper argues that these inherent compositional instabilitiesact to expand the agency of the narrator. This narratorialexpansion results in a number of significant shifts in narrativestructure. This paper contends that, as the narrator’s agencyincreases, new directions and multiplicities of meaning andinterpretation open up. This narratorial expansion not only actsto integrate the reader more interactively in the narrative, thereader becomes the very ground upon which the metafictionalnarrative establishes and/or de-establishes its own capacity forinterpretation.

Keywords: semiotics; narration; metafiction; parody;postmodern fiction.