As one of the first scholarly studies of Ulf Miehe’s Ich hab noch einen Toten in Berlin, this thesis undertakes a close reading of the novel, thereby providing a basis for further research. According to Linda Hutcheon's typology of metafiction as outlined in her book titled Narcisstic Narrative Miehe's novel displays the characteristics that fall under her category of overt metafiction, as opposed to covert metafiction. Overt metafiction self-consciously thematizes narrative, stating outright that a parallel theme to the narrative is the discussion of the narrative. Following mainly Hutcheon's defining characteristics of overt metafiction, I have separated my narrative analysis of Miehe's novel into three sections: pastiche, intertextuality, and narrative layering. The first two sections are concerned namely with how the novel engages with the discourses of the hard-boiled genre and the theoretical and social considerations of the artist, while the last section explores how the form and content expresses this self-conscious disruption of the narrative. The argument unfolds by first discussing Fredric Jameson's concept of pastiche in place of Linda Hutcheon's parody, as indicative of a shift from modernism to post-modernism. Benjamin's narrative (the main character) as a performance projects his pastiche of the hard-boiled genre onto Berlin, recording the gap between the world he experiences and the image he projects onto the world, indicating that it is to be read as imitation. Benjamin documents the inauthenticity of the hard-boiled genre's realism through his projection and indicates the possibility of many versions through Anna's countering version. In the second section, intertextuality is discussed through Hutcheon's link to T. S. Eliot's concept of tradition in literature. Miehe's intertextual references engage with the artistic, theoretical and social considerations of the tradition, including realism of the hard-boiled genre, influence anxiety, originality, inspiration, and race relations. When Miehe includes references to the hard-boiled genre in literature and film, and to himself, his novel questions the necessity and accuracy of the hard-boiled genre's claim to realism, but also expresses part of that questioning to be a comparison and search for inspiration for original work. This involves the recognition of the past texts as not the one and only authentic version or form, but that innovation requires a recreating of past texts. The last and third section concerns narrative layering as a means to thematize narrative within a narrative. Through the devices of mise en abyme, storytelling, narrative thematizing, and narrative framing, the text shows itself to be self-aware of its function as narrative, while creating that narrative. These devices attempt to engage the reader as an active participant as the text questions its own conceptualization of reality, the diegetic world, hopefully leading the reader to question the perception of reality presented in all texts. The occurrences of metafictional devices in Miehe's novel develop the text as what Patricia Waugh describes as the site of communication between the reader and the writer. The writer has dismantled the codes that would usually cause a passive reader. Instead, the reader is encouraged to recreate the narrative through disruptive clues. In this active role, detecting the authentic text becomes the investigation of the many texts.

As one of the first scholarly studies of Ulf Miehe’s Ich hab noch einen Toten in Berlin, this thesis undertakes a close reading of the novel, thereby providing a basis for further research. According to Linda Hutcheon's typology of metafiction as outlined in her book titled Narcisstic Narrative Miehe's novel displays the characteristics that fall under her category of overt metafiction, as opposed to covert metafiction. Overt metafiction self-consciously thematizes narrative, stating outright that a parallel theme to the narrative is the discussion of the narrative. Following mainly Hutcheon's defining characteristics of overt metafiction, I have separated my narrative analysis of Miehe's novel into three sections: pastiche, intertextuality, and narrative layering. The first two sections are concerned namely with how the novel engages with the discourses of the hard-boiled genre and the theoretical and social considerations of the artist, while the last section explores how the form and content expresses this self-conscious disruption of the narrative. The argument unfolds by first discussing Fredric Jameson's concept of pastiche in place of Linda Hutcheon's parody, as indicative of a shift from modernism to post-modernism. Benjamin's narrative (the main character) as a performance projects his pastiche of the hard-boiled genre onto Berlin, recording the gap between the world he experiences and the image he projects onto the world, indicating that it is to be read as imitation. Benjamin documents the inauthenticity of the hard-boiled genre's realism through his projection and indicates the possibility of many versions through Anna's countering version. In the second section, intertextuality is discussed through Hutcheon's link to T. S. Eliot's concept of tradition in literature. Miehe's intertextual references engage with the artistic, theoretical and social considerations of the tradition, including realism of the hard-boiled genre, influence anxiety, originality, inspiration, and race relations. When Miehe includes references to the hard-boiled genre in literature and film, and to himself, his novel questions the necessity and accuracy of the hard-boiled genre's claim to realism, but also expresses part of that questioning to be a comparison and search for inspiration for original work. This involves the recognition of the past texts as not the one and only authentic version or form, but that innovation requires a recreating of past texts. The last and third section concerns narrative layering as a means to thematize narrative within a narrative. Through the devices of mise en abyme, storytelling, narrative thematizing, and narrative framing, the text shows itself to be self-aware of its function as narrative, while creating that narrative. These devices attempt to engage the reader as an active participant as the text questions its own conceptualization of reality, the diegetic world, hopefully leading the reader to question the perception of reality presented in all texts. The occurrences of metafictional devices in Miehe's novel develop the text as what Patricia Waugh describes as the site of communication between the reader and the writer. The writer has dismantled the codes that would usually cause a passive reader. Instead, the reader is encouraged to recreate the narrative through disruptive clues. In this active role, detecting the authentic text becomes the investigation of the many texts.

Son Bird Saint is a literary novel that explores the idea of human lives influencing each other. At its core it is the story of Simon Hemphill who receives the handwritten life story of Wren Wallace, a famous friend of his parents’ whose life and death has shaped Simon’s past and future. When Simon travels between Saskatoon, Montreal and Toronto to interview the characters from Wren’s manuscript, he pieces together all the stories that converged to influence Wren Wallace’s life and, ultimately, his own. A story about understanding where you came from, Son Bird Saint is an omniscient narrative comprised of first-person narrators. Alternating between Simon’s interviews and Wren’s manuscript, the novel unravels a story much larger and more intricate than Wren or Simon could have foreseen. Spanning three generations and five decades, this novel explores character from youth to old age. It examines how we’re shaped by the people in our lives and those absent from it. Using metafictional techniques, the novel merges form and content into a multi-narrative story that exists outside the boundaries of traditionally structured literary novels.

Orientador: Ana Maria Carlos / Banca: Daniela Mantarro Calippo / Banca: Márcio Natalino Thamos / Resumo: Pretendemos examinar o conceito de metaficção, mais precisamente sua ligação com o teatro representacional, presente na minissérie Capitu, dirigida por Luiz Fernando Carvalho e exibida pela Rede Globo em 2008, uma adaptação do romance Dom Casmurro (1899), de Machado de Assis, evento promovido para homenagear o centenário de morte do escritor. Assim, correlacionaremos a linguagem intimista e dialógica que o narrador machadiano mantém com o leitor na obra literária com os aspectos metaficcionais presentes no meio audiovisual, mostrando que o novo molde estético adotado pelo diretor da minissérie busca ligações com o estilo machadiano: o de negação das ferramentas narrativas que criam a ilusão de realidade, deixando claro que suas palavras são conscientemente elaboradas e que o romance não é mais do que uma construção / Abstract: The goal is to examine the concept of metafiction, more precisely its connection with the representation theater present in the miniseries Capitu, from director Luiz Fernando Carvalho and aired by Globo in 2008, an adaptation of the romance Dom Casmurro (1899), Machado de Assis, part of an event celebrating the centenary of the writer's death. we intend to correlate the intimate and dialogic language that the narrator keeps with the reader in the literary work with the metafictional aspects presented in the audiovisual medium, showing that the new aesthetic mold adopted by the director searches links with Machado's style: the denial of the narrative tool that create the illusion of reality, making it clear that his words are consciously elaborated and that the romance is nothing but a construction / Mestre

The aim of this bachelor’s thesis is to discuss, and attempt to confirm, that Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) lacks closure. Since the novel has an unreliable narrator who offers her readers several credible endings to her narrative, and who also acts as the fictitious author of the story, unreliability and metafiction are claimed to be the main underlying causes of this deprivation of closure. The discussion in the first section of the analysis is based on the plot development depicted in Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid, and the second part is focused on Victoria Orlowski’s four metafictional characteristics denoting ways in which writers of metafiction transgress narrative levels. The claim is concluded to be partly fulfilled, since Atonement is regarded as lacking closure in terms of narrative structure but not in a philosophical and moral sense.

This thesis aims to demonstrate the interrelatedness of the rebellious form and content of Pilar MirO's first six films - La petición (1976), El crimen de Cuenca (1979), Gary Cooper gue estás en los cielos (1980), Hablamos esta noche (1982), Werther (1986) and Beltenebros (1991). The Introduction provides a brief outline of the director's life and an insight into some of the core themes of her cinema, summaries of relevant theoretical arguments from psychoanalysis and gender theory in the context of sociology and film studies and an outline of the situation of men and women in Spain vis-à-vis the law, social prejudices, attitudes to sexuality and work. Part I (chapters 1-6) examines gender issues and character portrayal in each of the films in chronological order using these theories. Part II deals with the metafictional textual strategies of Miró's works. Chapter 7 outlines features of metafiction, such as stylistic intertextuality, literal intertextuality, mise-en-abime devices and other cinematic strategies which highlight the constructed nature of the films by laying bare the processes of fictional creation and disturb the viewer, making him or her an active reader, who cannot acquiesce in a passive spectatorial position. It also discusses the issue of authorship in film to posit that Miró abdicates from the position of onmiscient auteur through intertextuality and her use of assistant authors, another strategy of metafictional, postmodern art. Chapters 8 and 9 look at specific examples of intertextuality. The first section of chapter 8 examines the thematic and stylistic influence of the American artist, Edward Hopper, on the setting of Beltenebros and José Gutiérrez Solana's tremendista paintings as a visual reference for El crimen de Cuenca: the chapter also takes into account the joint stylistic influence of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) on Beltenebros. The second section of chapter 8 applies theories of historiographic metafiction and intrahistory to Miró's depiction of a miscarriage of justice in the Spanish legal system and the imprisonment of two innocent men in El crimen de Cuenca. Chapter 9 outlines a special instance of intertextuality in Miró's employment of stars. Using recent work in star studies, I consider the contributions and implications of her choice of two actresses - Ana Belén and Patsy Kensit - to La petición and Beltenebros. The conclusion suggests that, while Miró demonstrates an active interest in and sympathy for the victims of oppression, her use of intertextuality may be unconscious and that this thesis presents just one possible argument or interpretation. An interview with Miró in 1995 is included in an Appendix, as are relevant stills of Ana Belén.

In this dissertation, aspects of the creative process involved in `writing the past' are theorised from the site of practice, from the viewpoint of the empirical author. Certain poststructuralist and postmodernist discourses, however, have problematised and de-stabilised the concepts of `history' and the `past', and called into question the unitary and authoritative nature of `truth', `knowledge' and `reality'. These contestings of the ontological status of `history' have alerted us to the importance of previously marginalised perspectives on historical `reality', especially those relating to gender, race and religion. This situation presents considerable challenges to the writer of historical fiction and the historian alike, rendering it difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct the `past' without irony. In the light of a general `crisis of representation', fiction purporting to deal with an increasingly elusive `past' can no longer proceed in the relatively uncomplicated manner of the traditional historical novel, with its emphasis on sustaining the referential illusion of the empirical `past', as though the `truth' of `past events' could be revealed `as it really was'. Some of the options for re-writing history figurally are considered, and my novel Watermarks situated within them as a blend of traditional historical fiction, neo-historical or revisionary fiction, and the more extreme or satirical forms of historiographic metafiction which radically revise, challenge or subvert established ways of `writing the past'. The focus of the latter two forms is not so much on history as objective facts and artifacts, as on the pluralistic, and sometimes relativistic, concept of history as perspective(s). The dissertation explores the genesis of Watermarks, the theoretical and practical implications of writing a neo-historical fiction, the difficulties of `writing the past', and the fictional strategies employed to address them. The metafictional strategies of framed narratives or inset tales, multiple (and sometimes unreliable) narrators, and transformative repetitions of prior texts (intertextuality) are examined in the light of Bakhtin's concept of the "dialogic of the imagination", and are shown to be an important means by which past worlds may be established and at the same time subverted in the discourse of the novel. Each of these strategies re-affirms a view of `history' and the `past' as a matter of mediated and provisional `truths'. The role of intertextuality in particular is examined at length, firstly in terms of its theoretical implications for the traditional view of the author as originator of the text, and secondly in practical terms as an important means of producing a multivocal, interrogative text, a vital source of the diverse `languages' which characterise the discourse of the novel.

Flann OBriens At Swim-Two-Birds is a complex reflexive novel that explores the creation of fiction. OBriens layered narrative includes several author/characters, each with his own literary theory. This discussion traces OBriens reflexive structures development and demonstrates its repercussions on the characters within the novel, and the novel as a whole. Beginning by placing OBriens novel within a critical framework, this study examines each of the four narrative levels and the uses of reflexivity in each. OBrien builds and dismantles several structures within his narrative levels, and this thesis shows that the basic reflexive structure of At Swim-Two-Birds is the only remaining structure at the novels end.

Flann OBriens At Swim-Two-Birds is a complex reflexive novel that explores the creation of fiction. OBriens layered narrative includes several author/characters, each with his own literary theory. This discussion traces OBriens reflexive structures development and demonstrates its repercussions on the characters within the novel, and the novel as a whole. Beginning by placing OBriens novel within a critical framework, this study examines each of the four narrative levels and the uses of reflexivity in each. OBrien builds and dismantles several structures within his narrative levels, and this thesis shows that the basic reflexive structure of At Swim-Two-Birds is the only remaining structure at the novels end.

This paper explores photography in children’s picturebooks and its ability to extend image-making and reading by creating a hybrid genre that merges real and non-real worlds. In analysing the use of photography in such a hybrid genre, the work of Lauren Child (2006, 2001a, 2001b, 2000), Polly Borland (2006), Shaun Tan (2007, 2000, 1998) and Dave McKean (2004a, 2004b, 1995) is deconstructed. These artists utilise photography in contemporary picturebooks that are fictional. In addition, David Doubilet’s images (1990, 1989, 1984, 1980) are discussed, which fuse underwater photojournalism with art, for factual outputs. This research uncovers a gap in picturebook literature and creates a new hybrid by merging genres to produce a work that is both factual and fictional. The research methodology in this study includes a brief overview of photography and notions of truth, contemporary picturebook trend theory, use of a student focus group, industry collaborations and workshops, and environmental education pedagogy. This thesis outlines summaries of research outcomes, not the least of which is the capacity for photography to enrich narrative accounts by providing multilayered information, character perspectives and/ or a metafictive experience. These research outcomes are then applied to the process of creating such a hybrid children’s picturebook.