Wisher, Emma Lauren
(2022)
Conscious Immersion and the Metamodern: A Critical Analysis of the Immersive Nature of Contemporary Metafiction.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
This thesis exemplifies the immersive nature of twenty-first century metafiction and examines the applicability of the emergent cultural ideology metamodernism through a critical analysis of Gilbert Adair’s And Then There Was No One, Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, as well as through creative practice with my novel Papercut. Papercut relates the story of Eve, a conflicted woman whose life becomes monotonous and restricted following the death of her mother and the disintegration of her relationship with her fiancé Nathan, causing her to devolve rapidly from her vibrant former self. Eve’s life begins to change, however, when her estranged brother Jay and his new girlfriend Morgan visit for the week, not just because they encourage Eve to reconsider who she wants to be, but because Morgan reveals the existence of a book called Rewritten, of which its plotlines and characters share unnerving similarities with Eve’s life. Eve commences an investigation of Rewritten and its author Jessica Eden in an attempt to comprehend the book’s origin and significance, only for her life, and the lives of those around her, to begin to replicate those of the characters in Eden’s novel, causing the distinction between reality and fiction to become increasingly blurred.
Whilst metafiction was once considered to be disruptive of the reader’s immersion, contemporary metafiction demonstrates an oscillation of its historicity, combining its modernist application of forging fictional worlds and characters that reflect how reality and the self are constructed, alongside its postmodern tendencies of foregrounding the artificiality of the text. This fluctuation, or metaxy, of the modern and the postmodern has seen metafiction evolve to become an affective and immersive system of techniques, in which the composition of the text is reinforced as a way to present the fictional world as real. The alternation between the modern and the postmodern is reflective of a wider shift in contemporary literature and ideologies, whereby a new cultural emergent has formed that some theorists refer to as metamodernism. This thesis provides a critical analysis of the immersive nature of contemporary metafiction, and of the suitability of metamodernism, through the identification of a new reading experience that I refer to as conscious immersion, which concerns the relocation of the reader within a wider fictional universe each time she encounters a metareference, instead of being restored to the real world. Alongside the primary fictional world of the main narrative, the fictional universe often features a faux-real world, occupied by a fictional version of the writer, reader and text, to which the reader is relocated through metareferences that are self-referential in nature. This thesis also constitutes a consolidation of existing theory regarding metafiction into a clear and coherent framework, recategorising metafiction into the three primary forms of thematic, structural and linguistic metareferences, which concern the subject matter, structural composition and linguistic properties of the text.
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