Historiographic Metafiction Research Articles

Dissident Laughter: Historiographic metafiction as parodic intervention in Benang and That Deadman Dance

Benang: From the Heart and That Deadman Dance are both seminal examples of postcolonial historical novels by Kim Scott that consider ‘how much speaking’ and ‘what sort of speaking’ can occur in relation to portrayals of Indigenous subjects and traumatic histories of dispossession. Both Scott’s novels differently recruit a range of parodic narrative techniques to critique the monologistic language of colonialism. This essay examines how Scott recruits historiographic metafiction in Benang: From the Heart and That Deadman Dance to generate new metaphors of colonial power relations within the novel as heteroglossic text.

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy as “Historiographic Metafiction”

Seeking to free us from the clutches of our self-made rigid conventions, postmodernism criticizes the metanarratives of modern times, while metafiction seems a better spokesman of it. New York Trilogy , Paul Auster’s debut composition and a meta-detective novel, has secured its fame in the postmodern fiction. It uses and abuses the conventions of detective novel, and lays bare the conventions of objective historiography. In doing this, Auster has given a self-reflective and equally historical dimension to his oeuvre through the technique of “historiographic metafiction”. Linda Hutcheon sees “historiographic metafiction” as a way to rewrite history in postmodern fiction. Postmodernism seeks to embrace a plurality of truths, and history is no longer monolithic and objective. Hutcheon contends that the postmodernist fiction is characterized by intense self-reflexivity and overtly parodic intertextuality. Utilizing historical accounts as intertextual effects, the writers of postmodernist fiction distrust in history. The present article will attempt to analyze New York Trilogy as a “historiographic metafiction”. Firstly, and insofar as it is within the scope of the article, it will attempt to offer a critical analysis of “postmodernism”, “metafiction”, and “metaphysical detective fiction”. Then, it will examine Auster’s novel as a “historiographic metafiction” in the light of Hutcheon’s theories.

The reworkings of the Western from the northern side of the Medicine Line: Caple’s In Calamity’s Wake , Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy and Stenson’s Lightning

This article analyses the adaptation and appropriation of the Western genre in novels by three Canadian authors: Natalee Caple’s In Calamity’s Wake, Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy and Fred Stenson’s Lightning. All three novels revisit, re-interpret and subvert the myth of the Wild West by: focusing on historicity in the form of historiographic metafiction or historical fiction; differentiating between the Canadian and American Wild Wests; laying bare the mythologisation processes of the Wild West as a nation-making myth; and foregrounding characters ex-centric for the Western, such as women, First Nations, Canadians, and atypical cowboys. In this way, the novels contribute to the Canadian new Western genre.

On connaît la musique. La vie culturelle au temps du siège de Leningrad dans La Vie d’un homme inconnu d’Andreï Makine

The present article focuses on the representation o f the cultural life during the siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) in Andrei Makine’s eleventh novel. Analysing the portrait of the block ade created by La Vie d’un homme inconnu (2009) in the light of historical works and personal writings, I demonstrate that despite its a pparent wish to contest the official version of the blockade Makine ends up endorsing some of the myths established by Soviet propaganda. He thus emphasises the Leningraders’ heroism, altruism and high level of culture, representing the blokadniki as active defenders of the city rather than helpless victims of both the atrocious conditions imposed by the siege and Stalinist terror. Consequently, alt hough the novel may seem to belong to the canon of historiographic metafiction which systematically questions official historiography an d gives voice to those excluded from making and writing History, a c areful reading of the Franco-Russian author’s eleventh work of fictio n reveals its conservative — not to say reactionary — character, even if La Vie d’un homme inconnu may be challenging another dominant discourse regarding the Soviet Union’s role in World War II, namely that forged in the West.

Storytelling and Affect in Sonya Hartnett’s The Children of the King (2012)


 
 
 Melbourne writer Sonya Hartnett frequently explores the ways in which a sense of place impacts on the development of identity. In her memoir Life in Ten Houses (2012), Hartnett maps each of her novels to her place of habitation at the time of writing, describing the relationship between each place and herself and the subsequent impact of this dialectic on the creative process. This reciprocal relationship between narrative and lived experience is examined in Hartnett’s novel The Children of the King (2012). Using perspectives on temporality from phenomenology and cultural memory and incorporating ideas of place from human and cultural geography, this article proposes that Hartnett uses the device of embedded narrative to examine the affective qualities of storytelling and place on the subject. This juxtaposition invites the reader to consider the fluid notions of identity inspired by embodied oral storytelling along with the perceptual opportunities afforded by the physical, sensorial world. Hartnett encourages the reader to critically assess the reliability of narrative, narrator, and the process of subjective judgement that occurs when responding to story. This recalls Linda Hutcheon’s (1989) work on historiographic metafiction, which, as she describes, has the effect of demarginalising the literary ‘through confrontation with the historical’ (p. 108). Metafictive historiographic novels, as Robyn McCallum (1999) articulates: ‘foreground the discursive and textual conventions of history writing, usually by physically incorporating and representing historical texts and discourses in ways that destabilise the relation between fiction, history and reality’ (p. 230). In The Children of the King this destabilisation is achieved through Hartnett’s double plot structure which calls attention to the constructed and affective elements of historical and fictional narratives and by the employment of the gothic mode within a realist frame.
 
 

History Rewritten in a Postmodern Novel: Opposed Views on History in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion

The relationship and interaction between literature and history has long been analyzed and discussed throughout the history of literature. In twentieth century literature this relationship has shown itself within the works of historiographic metafiction. In this kind of writing, previously held notions about language, truth, history and literature are subverted. With the rise of postmodern theories, such as poststructuralism, these concepts are thought of carrying no more definite, full and total meaning and reference. Winterson’s The Passion is one of the best examples of historiographic metafictions that underline the polyphonic structure lying beneath systems of meaning. In The Passion Winterson’s handling of the subject is surrounded by her use of multiple narratives, parody and fantasy. Thus, this paper aims at presenting how these ingredients of historiographic metafiction display themselves in Winterson’s The Passion .

The (Im)possibility of Objectivity: Narrating the Past in Young Adult Historiographic Metafiction

This article uses two Australian historiographic metafictive texts, Into White Silence (Eaton, 2008) and The Lace Maker’s Daughter (Crew, 2005), to demonstrate how particular narrative strategies destabilize the relationship between history and fiction and the past and the present.

In a Queer Gothic Space and Time: Love Triangles in Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate

In her work, Jeanette Winterson consistently shows an interest in history and the way in which it has been transmitted through generations. In particular, she attempts to fill in the gaps of historical representation by shedding light on those identities that were marginalised and made invisible because they ostensibly violated society’s norms, or because they were perceived as deviant and threatening for the social order. From her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) to her more recent works, Winterson reclaims a verbal and symbolic space for those subjects whom society has failed to recognise. Winterson narratively revisits history by adopting and combining several technical postmodern strategies, such as historiographic metafiction, parody, intertextuality, self-reflectivity and pastiche. In so doing, she aims to explore the cultural construction of sexual and gender identities as well as to challenge patriarchal and heterosexual hegemonic discourses.

Identidades cruzadas: História do Cerco de Lisboa e Geschichte Der Belagerung Von Lissabon

It is well known that the novel The History of the Siege of Lisbon undertakes a revision of the origin of Portuguese identity by revealing the fragile historical fundament in the sense of a culture’s hybridity. This study argues that in this story the problematic search for ‘pure’ historical origin is intertwined with the search for ‘pure’ text. By analyzing the dense intertextual net of Raimundo Silva’s doubtful and creative proof-reading it becomes evident that it is less a question of proof-reading than of translating that is at stake in this historiographic metafiction. From this perspective the adventure of reading/writing turns out to be a question of criss-crossed identity that is extended to the novel’s reader: in the case of its translation into German, the new text has to tackle with the reader’s cultural affinity with the Crusaders.

Um ‘quase-africano:’ Re-significações de Fradique Mendes em Nação crioula, de José Eduardo Agualusa

In this article, I present Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa’s Nação crioula: A correspondência secreta de Fradique Mendes (1997) as a post-modern parody of the ctional character Fradique Mendes from Eça de Queirós’ A correspondência de Fradique Mendes (1900). Through parody, Agualusa creates historiographic metafiction meant to question the possibility of objective representations of reality, an issue central to post-modern aesthetics. I further propose that this questioning extends a discussion that is already suggested by Eça’s original text at the turn of the twentieth century, when concerns about the possibility of objective representations of reality also came to the fore.

Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage

Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage

Je Me Souviens – Re/Writings of History in Contemporary Canadian Drama

For a nation as young as Canada, writings and rewritings of history become essential elements in the creation of a postcolonial and independent national literature. This process was initiated during the late 1960s and 1970s, and it is not until the 1980s that we see theoretical perspectives being developed. Linda Hutcheon’s reading of Canadian culture as driven by a sense of irony and obsessed with historiographic metafiction provides the context for William J. Keith’s attempt at a national canon (building on the work of Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood), which orchestrates the emergence of contemporary Canadian drama. Following an exploration of the critics’ work, six contemporary Canadian plays are briefly introduced and discussed as to how they actively re/write histories, or even the conventions of narrative themselves: Kevin Loring’s Where the Blood Mixes (2009), David Yee’s lady in the red dress (2010), Lorena Gale’s Je Me Souviens (2001), Daniel MacIvor’s Cul-de-Sac (2005), Timothy Findley’s Elizabeth Rex (2000), and Guillermo Verdecchia’s bloom (2007). Fundamental questions about identification, discursive authority, and responsibility arise from this mosaic of Canadian voices.

The Creation of History and Stories in Graham Swift’s Novel Waterland

The article focuses on the issue of history as narrative in Graham Swift’s novel Waterland, drawing on Roland Barthes’s theory of the discourse of history as well as on Hayden White’s claim that historical narratives are invented verbal fictions. The postmodernist notion of history denies the fixity of any text, of the past and of any single objective truth about the past.For Swift the creation of history means the reconstruction of the past by means of imagination. Thus in his historiographic metafiction history and imagination are subtly intertwined. History becomes story telling.The opposition between history and story telling is the focus of Swift’s novel. By telling stories its narrator recaptures the lost past, reconstructs his lifestory and by this act constructs history. History as narrative is primarily a personal rather than a factual reality.

James Joyce’s Ulysses in Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial

The aim of this article is to analyse the presence of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) in Respiracion artificial, the first novel by the Argentinean writer Ricardo Piglia (1941- ). Published in 1980, Respiracion is a fictional representation of a near and tragic past, the last Military Dictatorship in Argentina, but it is also a literary re-assessment of earlier stages in the history of the nation, as well as a metatextual comment on western culture and on Argentine literature. James Joyce’s Ulysses is present in Piglia’s novel mainly through its main character, Emilio Renzi, who belongs to a literary genealogy that can be traced back to Stephen Dedalus and even Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist of Stephen Hero. The analysis will focus on the many allusions and quotations of Ulysses in Piglia’s novel with the purpose of showing how they are resignified by Piglia in a different sociocultural context. Keywords: Ulysses; Respiracion artificial; Stephen Dedalus; Emilio Renzi; historiographic metafiction.

Hyperlinking History and Illegitimate Imagination: The Historiographic Metafictional E-novel

‘Historiographic Metafiction’ (HM) is a literary term first coined by creative writing academic Linda Hutcheon in 1988, and which refers to the postmodern practice of a fiction author inserting imagined--or illegitimate--characters into narratives that are intended to be received as authentic and historically accurate, that is, ostensibly legitimate. Such adventurous and bold authorial strategies frequently result in “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, A Poetics 5). They can be so entertaining and engaging that the overtly intertextual, explicitly inventive work of biographical HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (Nunning 353) for, as Philippa Gregory, the author of HM novel The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), has said regarding this genre of creative writing: “Fiction is about imagined feelings and thoughts. History depends on the outer life. The novel is always about the inner life. Fiction can sometimes do more than history. It can fill the gaps” (University of Sussex). In a way, this article will be filling one of the gaps regarding HM...

“Longing on a Large Scale Is What Makes History”: The Uses of Baseball and the Problem of Storytelling in Don DeLillo’s Underworld

“Longing on a Large Scale Is What Makes History”The Uses of Baseball and the Problem of Storytelling in Don DeLillo’s Underworld Philipp Löeffler (bio) Critics like to speak in superlatives when they measure the impact of Don DeLillo on postwar American fiction, but there is considerable disagreement about the precise nature of his greatness.1 According to John Duvall, DeLillo is “one of the most important American novelists since 1970” because of “his fiction’s repeated invitation to think historically.”2 Duvall’s assessment is a viable starting point, because however central Don DeLillo’s work really is, it no doubt reflects an almost obsessive interest in the history of the postwar decades. DeLillo’s novels are all—in some way or another—focused on the extent to which the Cold War has shaped American culture in ways that are not documented in official, textbook versions of the twentieth century. His novels remind us constantly to think beyond the confines of the ordinary and to look at those figures that often evade the frameworks of historiography proper. And yet the point of DeLillo’s fiction is not mainly to envision alternative plots and speculative counterhistories that would oppose more traditional accounts of the postwar era. That would be a traditional postmodernist agenda, asking what we can or cannot know about history. For DeLillo, American history is relevant as a very practical archive of stories that people need to get a grip on their own lives—here and now—and not primarily as a field of epistemological inquiry or skepticism. In this article, I plan to discuss this shift in focus—from history understood as an epistemological object to history understood as a site of memory—in the context of DeLillo’s much acclaimed novel Underworld (1997). The novel celebrates individual moments of commemoration as a legitimate and reliable form of historical sense-making and thus provides a contrast to more traditional versions of postmodernist historiographic metafiction. As readers of Underworld delve into the worlds of the postwar decades, they learn about the uses rather than the truth of history that such literary encounters enable. That is to say, readers learn that how we perceive a series of historical events [End Page 91] is conditioned by the ways we conceptualize them within a coherent narrative. DeLillo seems to be suggesting that we need such narratives to stabilize our individual life worlds, rather than to find out about what really happened at a particular point in time. This is why for DeLillo the Cold War period is integral as a cultural reference frame: not because we need additional knowledge about the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of John. F. Kennedy, or Watergate, but because the Cold War period itself sparked the coevolution of a historical vocabulary that allowed people in the postwar decades to know what they believed in and what their stories about life in America meant. Hence, my argument will be that Underworld is a novel dedicated not exclusively to crucial events of the Cold War decades but also to the mechanisms of storytelling and a corresponding belief system that helped people to define themselves meaningfully as historical subjects. The second claim I want to make pertains to the problem of storytelling and how Underworld appropriates the history of postwar American baseball, more particularly the history of the Dodgers versus Giants series in October 1951. Many critics read DeLillo’s baseball obsession as just another moment of allegorizing the Cold War decades, famously suggested by the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in John Drebinger’s article for the New York Times.3 But the incorporation of baseball into the novel goes way beyond mere allegorical symbolism. The cultural logic of baseball is inextricably entwined with Underworld’s theoretical commitment to a memory discourse in which the subjectivity of individual experiences supplants the authority of “objective” history, as it were. Like baseball, history depends on sudden and often unpredictable turns of events. Such events evade traditional analytical categories and become meaningful only through their incorporation into the story worlds of very personal lives. This is how they are endowed with meaning and reliability no matter how implausible their...

The Secret History of Sprawl: Joyce Carol Oates'sExpensive Peopleand the Deterritorialization of Suburbia

American postwar suburbanization is rarely—if ever—discussed through the rhetorics of postmodernism and globalization. The suburban novel genre contributes to the view of the suburbs as detached from such sweeping historical developments. Indeed the characteristic discontent found throughout suburban narratives stems from feelings of isolation and detachment. Joyce Carol Oates's novel provides an opportunity to rethink the relationship between supposedly private, domestic problems and public history. Through allusions to the Detroit riot of 1967 and the Vietnam War, Expensive People suggests an unusual connection between the public violence of these late-sixties conflicts, on the one hand, and the protagonist's “disintegration” and his mother's mysterious death—the ultimate products of their suburban discontent—on the other. This connection can be elaborated through the concepts of sprawl and deterritorialization, which help explain how the same racist, expansionist, capitalist agenda that has harmed the populations of inner-city Detroit and rural Vietnam can simultaneously benefit affluent white suburbanites. Expensive People should thus be read as a historiographical metafiction that satirizes the suburban genre, questioning the assumption that detachment and discontent go hand in hand in the American suburbs.

Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice ed. by Elizabeth M. Ginway and J. Andrew Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice ed. by Elizabeth M. Ginway and J. Andrew Brown Samuel Manickam Ginway, M. Elizabeth, and J. Andrew Brown, eds. Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Pp. 241. ISBN 978–1–137–28122–7. In the last approximately fifteen years, scholarly attention on Latin American science fiction has steadily increased. Once confined to the shadows of Hispanic literary studies, this genre is now taken seriously by scholars since it is considered to be an important window into the cultures and histories of this region. Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice, edited by M. Elizabeth Ginway and J. Andrew Brown, is a good addition to this growing field of studies since, as the editors note, if many early studies tended to be “archeological,” that is, bringing to light various lost and unknown science fiction texts, then the essays contained in this volume represent some current attempts to interpret this literature in its various cultural and historical contexts in Latin America. The ten essays are divided into three categories: “Speculating a Canon: Latin America’s SF [Science Fiction] Traditions,” “On the Periphery of the Periphery: Cyberpunk and Zombies in Latin America” and “Comics and Film: Latin American SF across Genres.” Essays on Mexican, Argentine and Brazilian science fiction constitute a majority since these three countries are the main Latin American producers of this genre. There are also essays on science fiction from Cuba, Chile and Bolivia. As will be apparent by reading these essays, science fiction has given Latin American writers, as well as filmmakers and cartoonists, the artistic license not normally afforded by more traditional approaches to questions of national identity, among other issues. The most interesting essays in this volume carefully examine science fiction texts through theories on, for example, historiographic metafiction, irony and allegory, while contextualizing them within the history and culture of their respective Latin American countries. In her essay “Islands in the Slipstream: Diasporic Allegories in Cuban Science Fiction since the Special Period,” Emily A. Maguire outlines the problematic relationship Cubans experience with technology in a country forcibly isolated by economic sanctions and a repressive government. The three stories analyzed show three authors utilizing science fiction to speak symbolically about their isolated, exiled situations. In “Time Travel and History in Carmen Boullosa’s 1991 Llanto, novelas imposibles,” Claire Taylor convincingly demonstrates how this Mexican novelist uses the SF trope of time travel to problematize the historiographic process of ascertaining the truth regarding the Aztec emperor Moctezuma’s death. Álvaro Bisama’s essay “Bolaño and Science Fiction: Deformities” creatively strays from conventional “scholarly” protocols and is therefore a true pleasure to read. Bisama weaves the narrative of Bolaño’s life with his works [End Page 328] while showing aspects of science fiction in both. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado’s essay “Ending the World with Words: Bernardo Fernández and the Institutionalization of Science Fiction in Mexico” is perhaps the first serious critical overview of this author, who has been key in endowing science fiction with literary respect and credibility in Mexico today. The author’s thorough analysis of Fernández’s works by couching it in the post-NAFTA era is commendable. In her essay “Oesterheld’s Iconic and Ironic Eternautas,” Rachel Haywood Ferreira gives a complete overview of the evolution of this Argentine’s comic series titled Eternautas (for which he wrote the text while the drawings were done by others). Haywood Ferreira clearly contextualizes the Eternautas series in the Cold War and Dirty War eras in Argentina. Oesterheld’s “disappearance” by the military junta in the eighties sadly demonstrates how science fiction in Latin America imbued with political commitment can be considered “dangerous” by the authorities. The other five essays in this collection focus on further variations of science fiction in Latin America: a dystopian vision of Argentina in the film Sexilia, the Brazilian João Guimaráes Rosa’s early science fiction stories, the figure of the zombie as conceived in Chilean and Bolivian novels, science fiction motifs in Brazilian comics from the turn of the twentieth century, and elements of science fiction in some Brazilian films. These...

Reclaiming the Past: Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History

This essay examines the connection between body, history, and nation in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1993). The novel dramatizes and responds to questions concerning national belonging and community, while at the same time it longs to escape or transcend nation and history. The dialectical push and pull of this desire to escape and return is animated through the way that The English Patient imagines the body as a contested and contesting space, a conduit into the past and the means through which that past might be reclaimed. As a consequence, I hope to nuance political assessments of the novel and of Ondaatje’s contribution to historiographical metafiction more broadly, as well as his dual status as both a postmodern and postcolonial writer.

PENSANDO A TEORIA LITERÁRIA À LUZ DA INTERDISCIPLINARIDADE

A Era Multicultural em que vivemos assinala a necessidade de interação entre diferentes disciplinas acadêmicas, cujo fim é alargar o escopo epistemológico das mesmas. Este desiderato deu forma à interdisciplinaridade levando o campo literário, por exemplo, a entrelaçar-se com a historiografia de modo a trabalhar questões como a transposição de contextos e personagens históricos para o ambiente literário, formas de narrativa, etc. Logo, as postulações da metaficção historiográfica, nova história e pós-colonialismo estão na ordem do dia