GLOSSARY OF TERMS: POSTMODERNISM

 Historiographic metafiction: The term “historiographic metafiction” was coined by

Linda Hutcheon in her essay “Beginning to Theorize the Postmodern” in 1987 and then
further developed in her seminal study A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) to describe
“those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet
paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages.” According to
Hutcheon, novels such as E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975) or William Kennedy's Legs
(1975) display “a theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs
(historiographic metafiction) [that] is made the grounds for [a] rethinking and
reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (1988 5). Historiographic metafiction
thus constitutes a specific form of metafiction, which Patricia Waugh, in an equally
influential study, has defined as “fictional writing which self-consciously and
systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions
about the relationship between fiction and reality” (1984 2). However, historiographic
metafiction adds a further dimension to such reflections: texts that can be subsumed
under the heading not only explore the workings of literature and lay bare its
ontological status as fiction. They additionally engage and unveil the parallels between
writing literature and historiography – the practice of writing history – suggesting that
both are acts of construction that do not reflect or naively represent reality or the
past, but (re)invent and shape them from necessarily subjective and ideologically laden
perspectives.
Metafiction often includes this characteristics: addressing the reader.
 a story within a story.
 a story about a someone reading or writing a book.
 characters that are aware that they are taking part in a story.
 commenting on the story while telling it, either in footnotes or within the text.

 Intertextuality: is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text, either through

deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism,
translation, pastiche or parody or by interconnections between similar or related
works perceived by an audience or reader of the text. These references are sometimes
made deliberately and depend on a reader's prior knowledge and understanding of the
referent, but the effect of intertextuality is not always intentional and is sometimes
inadvertent. Often associated with strategies employed by writers working in
imaginative registers (fiction, poetry, and drama and even non-written texts like
performance art and digital media).
 Simulacrum: The simulacrum is a form of copy that imitates falsely, that claims to be
real rather than a representation, and thus threatens the act of representation itself.
The notion of the simulacrum has thus never been far from judgements about good
and evil: it is the product of deception, often for gain. Such is the sense we get from
Plato in The Sophist and in The Republic where he reflects on the relation of the real to
representation, notably in the allegory of the cave, where, despite its difficulties, he
never abandons the desirability of truth, and reflection on how we share truth or
thoughts about it.
 Metanarrative: is a narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience, or
knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a
(as yet unrealized) master idea.