The Lives of Animals is a metafiction novel based on a lecture given by a fictional character named Elizabeth Costello. Elizabeth is an animal rights activists who presents at Appleton College to inform other people on her values of how animals are treated so unethically. Moreover, Costello emphaisizes her belief that humans do not need to eat meat to survive. Moreover, Costello strongly disagrees with the use of farms (which she refers to as factorieies) and slaughterhouses where animals are…
playing on the internal and external thoughts of her characters. The metafictional engagement between the 3rd person narrator and Arthur Pritt, who tells a story within Jubilee, questions the importance of Arthur 's role as a story teller. Metafiction is 'stories [which] have something to tell us about stories themselves '. In Jubilee, the reader is conscious of the telling of stories, as well as, who is narrating them, and the metafictional qualities reveal the insignificance of the…
The Novel, ‘The Curious Incident of the dog in the night time’ By Mark Haddon is constructed through the simultaneous naive and profound lens of Christopher Boone, but it is the inclusion of irony and epistolary form that gave the novel breadth and depth. Throughout the novel It’s illustrated the struggles of human communication. Throughout the genre of crime fiction and the distinctive narrative voice of the main protagonist, Christopher Boone, the reader is taken on a journey which explores…
“Life is not fair, it is just fairer than death” by “abridging” S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventures. Firstly, Goldman satirizes the romance genre to reveal a collective idealism embedded within human nature. Then, he uses metafiction to contrast the parallel stories between Westley and Buttercup to Goldman and Helen. Lastly through Domingo, Yeste, and Inigo’s stories, the author illustrates life’s imperfection. Westley and Buttercup have an ideal love story, where…
“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, describes a utopian city, but not without a twist. With this piece, the author provokes the reader to question the morality of utilitarianism as both a citizen of the fictional city, and allegorically as a member of our world. Le Guin uses many literary tactics to compel the reader to be critical of her fictional society, primarily sharply contrasting imagery and metafictional writing techniques. The creation of two distinctly contrasting worlds, Omelas and…
VIRGIL AND MARLOWE: PRESENT, METAFICTION AND AENEAS A hero of incredible reputation and strength on the one hand, a man with no identity or motivation on the other. Virgil’s Aeneid and Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage depict the same hero as the lead character, yet their Aeneas’s differ from one another. Although both Virgil and Marlowe use more or less the same characters, similar events and metafictional devices, Virgil strives to convey the imperial ideology into the text by prioritizing…
But rather he is challenging the British literary world, and their belief that they hold all the knowledge to Shakespeare’s plays. He does this constantly throughout the entire film, showing scenes of British scholars where he has put them on the spot making them seem as if they don’t know anything. A great example of this is when he is interviewing Emrys Jones, a well-known Shakespeare academic and he is asked a question to which he responds, “I don’t really know the answer.” Straight away the…
Throughout reading The Things They Carried, my understanding of particular literary theories has vastly increased. The main lenses in which my group used to interpret the novel was feminist, psychoanalytical, and postmodernism. During the first block, it was more difficult to determine which lens to look through, and a lot of thought had to be put in when reading the block as a whole. But, as the book progressed, I began to pick up on particular instances and immediately recognized which…
Hutcheon tries to note that “there is not a break” or “outside” but only co-existing from within (Hutcheon, A Poetics xiii). She argues that if we are to call postmodern as a form, it is to be named “historiographic metafiction” which is “intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (5). Postmodernism challenges “the institutions” that attempt to form a context in a totalizing sense and the “contemporary debates about…
By using devices such as temporal distortion and especially metafiction Vonnegut blurs the line between history and reality and create a rather dark irony for his characters deaths like the fact the Billy (an American) was almost killed by the Allied forces. Some more examples are those that his father was killed via…