Enhancing the critical apparatus for understanding metanarration: discourse deixis refined
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Andrea Macrae
Abstract
This article explores the deictic functioning of metanarrative expressions in fiction. Current theoretical approaches to metanarration are reviewed, and classifying terminology revised. This critique enables the development of a more nuanced typology of metanarration, exposes the lack of linguistic analysis of the functioning of metanarrative expressions, and indicates the deictic contribution to this functioning. The role of deixis within metanarration is then further explicated. The category of discourse deixis is investigated and refined, and various subtypes of discourse deixis correlated with subtypes of metanarrative expressions. The analytical value of this approach is demonstrated through the study of discourse deixis in metanarrative extracts from Beckett's (Pan Books, 1979 [1959]) The unnameable, Federman's (Fiction Collective, 1976) Take it or leave it and Barth's (Random House, 1988 [1969]) Lost in the funhouse.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Articles in the same Issue
- Unveiling the dramatic secret of ‘Ghost’ in Hamlet
- Enhancing the critical apparatus for understanding metanarration: discourse deixis refined
- Towards a new convergence between Anglo-American and Russian literary linguistics: “mind style” and “kartina mira”
- A corpus-based approach to mind style
- The implied author in the conceptual context of hypothetical intentionalism: A good explication of the concept? On Kindt and Muller's The implied author: Concept and controversy
- Reviews
- Towards a ‘natural’ narratology: Frames and pedagogy. A reply to Nilli Diengott
- Index of articles in Volume 39 (2010)
Articles in the same Issue
- Unveiling the dramatic secret of ‘Ghost’ in Hamlet
- Enhancing the critical apparatus for understanding metanarration: discourse deixis refined
- Towards a new convergence between Anglo-American and Russian literary linguistics: “mind style” and “kartina mira”
- A corpus-based approach to mind style
- The implied author in the conceptual context of hypothetical intentionalism: A good explication of the concept? On Kindt and Muller's The implied author: Concept and controversy
- Reviews
- Towards a ‘natural’ narratology: Frames and pedagogy. A reply to Nilli Diengott
- Index of articles in Volume 39 (2010)
