Mourning and Metafiction: Carole Maso's "The Art Lover"

Abstract

f we are trapped within Fredric Jameson's much-celebrated prison house of language, then the bars of that prison house can be broadly construed in terms of aestheticization-a process of discursive rendering that shapes our worlds through the ineluctable mediums of perception and articulation. This process of discursive rendering is, of course, at play in every literary work, though individual works may seek to varying degrees either to display or to hide the processes through which language is shaped and patterned into the literary work itself. At an extreme end of this spectrum, metafictional works relentlessly foreground, through their patent self-reflexivity, the aesthetic boundaries of their linguistic prison. By drawing attention, in a sustained and systematic fashion, to the literary conventions and linguistic medium that constitute a fictional work, metafiction exposes and examines the aesthetic conditions of the literary prison house. Although the element of self-reflexivity that defines metafiction has long been recognized, the implications of this self-reflexivity have also been extended beyond the domain of metafictional works. For Patricia Waugh, the tendency of metafiction to scrutinize the conditions and limits of its own aesthetic construction can provide extremely accurate models for understanding the contemporary