The Metafictioning Manifold

Beschreibung

John Wolfgang Roberts' The Metafictioning Manifold: Stories that Matter is an ambitious work of posthumanist narratology. This study weaves together the neocybernetic emphasis on situating living systems in relation to cognitive technologies with media theory and the new materialism to argue for the pervasive entanglement of story and world. Roberts draws out of this nexus an affirmation of narrative encounter as a transformative ethical practice.   —Bruce Clarke, Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science Emeritus, Texas Tech University

This book argues that metafiction should not be understood as a self-contained textual technique but as an active practice. Moving from foundational accounts of metafiction to sustained readings of modern and recent experimental narratives, the book develops a methodological model informed by performative, neocybernetic, agential realist, and diffractive theories. It shows how metafiction functions as an ethical, relational, and material practice, reconfiguring relationships between people, technologies, and societies. By reframing metafiction as a dynamic process rather than a static object, this study opens new ways of thinking about materiality, agency, responsibility, and meaning. It calls for renewed attention to metafiction as a form of storytelling that matters in the world, shaping us as much as we shape our stories. It is relevant to students and scholars in literature and critical theory.

John Wolfgang Roberts is Foreign Teacher of English, Writing, and British and American Literature at the Faculty of Education, Mie University, Japan. His research focuses on metafiction and narratives at the intersections of literature, science, posthumanities, and narrative ethics. He received his PhD in 2020 from the University of Birmingham.

This book argues that metafiction should not be understood as a self-contained textual technique but as an active practice. Moving from foundational accounts of metafiction to sustained readings of modern and recent experimental narratives, the book develops a methodological model informed by performative, neocybernetic, agential realist, and diffractive theories. It shows how metafiction functions as an ethical, relational, and material practice, reconfiguring relationships between people, technologies, and societies. By reframing metafiction as a dynamic process rather than a static object, this study opens new ways of thinking about materiality, agency, responsibility, and meaning. It calls for renewed attention to metafiction as a form of storytelling that matters in the world, shaping us as much as we shape our stories. It is relevant to students and scholars in literature and critical theory.

Autor*in

John Wolfgang Roberts

Themen in »The Metafictioning Manifold«

Posthuman approaches to metafiction Experimental narrative forms in contemporary literature Metafiction and posthuman literary theory Narrative systems and material ecologies Performativity and fiction in the 21st century Neocybernetics and literary theory Self-Reflexive fiction and human experience Diffraction and narrative entanglement Narrative and material entanglement and emergence Metafiction and literature as heuristic world-making The philosophy of metafictional storytelling Entangled and emergent narrative structures in literature Fiction as epistemology, ontology, and ethics Metafictions as models of becoming Posthumanism and experimental fiction studies

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