Frankestein

"The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of being I had created, I rushed out of the room and continued a long time traversing my bedchamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep".

(Mary Shelley, Frankestein)

Abrazos y fueguitos

“…—El mundo es eso —reveló—. Un montón de gente, un mar de fueguitos.

Cada persona brilla con luz propia entre todas las demás.

No hay dos fuegos iguales. Hay fuegos grandes y fuegos chicos y fuegos de todos los colores. Hay gente de fuego sereno, que ni se entera del viento, y gente de fuego loco, que llena el aire de chispas.
Algunos fuegos, fuegos bobos, no alumbran ni queman;
pero otros arden la vida con tantas ganas que no se puede mirarlos sin parpadear, y quien se acerca, se enciende.”

(Eduardo Galeano. El libro de los abrazos)

The Way We Talk

"The way we talk, whether it is a life choice or an immutable characteristic, is akin to other attributes of the self that the law protects. In privacy law, due process law, protection against cruel and unusual punishment, and freedom from inquisition, we say the state cannot intruce upon the core of you, cannot take away your sacred places of the self. A citizen's accent, I would argue, resides in one of those places." (Matsuda 1991:1391-2)

"What is Metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it?"

From Metafiction, Patricia Waugh,UK, 1984.

WHAT IS METAFICTION?

Metafiction is a term given to 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. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text. (Waugh 2).
Spectrum: Metafiction is thus an elastic term which cover a wide range of fictions. There are those novels at one end of the spectrum which take fictionality as a theme to be explored whose formal self-consciousness is limited. At the center of this spectrum are those texts that manifest the symptoms of formal and ontological insecurity but allow their deconstructions to be finally recontextualized or 'naturalized' and given a total interpretation . . .Finally, at the furthest extreme that, in rejecting realism more thoroughly, posit the world as a fabrication of competing semiotic systems which never correspond to material conditions, ...(Waugh 18-19)

Patricia Waugh makes us point out the similarities among a selection of quotations and she lists three things readers would say:

A celebration of power of creative imagination together with an uncertainty about the validity of its representation

Literary form and the act of writing fictions

A parodic, playful, excessive or deceptively naive style of writing.

But, the reader is offering a description of the concerns and characteristics of the fiction, so the term “Metafiction” needs to be defined:

“Metafiction is a term given to a fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship of fiction to reality”

So, Waugh claims that such writings not only examine the fundamental structure of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text.

NOVELS EXPLORE THE THEORY OF FICTION THROUGH THE PRACTICE OF WRITING FICTION.

Metafiction poses questions through its formal self-exploration, drawing on the traditional metaphor of the world as book.

Consequently, if our knowledge of the world (as individuals) is now seen to be mediated through language, then literary fiction becomes a useful model for learning about the construction of “reality” itself.

According to Waugh, “Language is an independent self-contained system which generates its own meanings. Its relationship to the phenomenal world is highly complex, problematic and regulated by convention. Meta terms, therefore, are required in order to explore the relationship between this arbitrary linguistic system and the world to which it apparently refers”.

World OF fiction = World OUTSIDE the fiction

If the writer sets out to “represent” the world, he or she would realize that the world as such, cannot be “represented”. They can only “represent” the DISCOURSES of that world.

The dilemma Metafiction sets out to explore: How is it possible to “describe” anything?

Hjelmslev developed the term “Metalanguage”: “Language which, instead of referring to non-linguistic events, situations or objects in the world, refers to another language: it is a language which takes another as its objects”.

In Saussure’s terms, a “metalanguage” is a language that functions as a signifier to another language, and this other language becomes its signified.

So, in the process of writing, what is explored is the problematic relationship between life and fiction.

Metafiction pays attention to particular conventions of the novel by which the process of its construction is displayed. Novels attempt to create alternative linguistic structures or fictions which imply the old forms by encouraging the reader to draw on his or her knowledge of traditional literary conventions when struggling to construct a meaning for the new text.

Examples:

The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

Grendel by John Gardner

The Lime Twig by John Hawkes

Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan

Metafiction and the novel tradition

Patricia Waugh argues that, “… the term “Metafiction” might be new, the practice is as old (if not older) than the novel itself…Metafiction is a tendency or function inherent in all novels”

Novels are constructed on the principle of fundamental and sustained opposition:

CONSTRUCTION OF AN ILLUSION

As a consequence of this, more and more novelists question and reject forms that correspond to ordered reality:

This is done so, in order to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction. Writers feel that any attempt to represent reality an only produce selective perspectives.

Novel tradition	Metafictional writings
A well-made plot Chronological sequence Authoritative omniscient narrator Rational connections Atmosphere of certainty	The process of constructing the world is more important than the plot Unimportance of sequence & details Plurality of voices Non rational connections Atmosphere of uncertainty

Stereotypes

"All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology"

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1975)

It's all about the cookies!

A young lady was waiting for her flight in the boarding room of an airport. As she would need to wait many hours, she decided to buy a book to spend her time. She also bought a packet of cookies. She sat down in the VIP room of the airport, to rest and read in peace.

Beside the armchair where the packet of cookies lay, a man sat down in the next seat, opened his magazine and started reading. When she took out the first cookie, the man took one also. She felt irritated but said nothing. She just thought: “What a nerve! If I was in the mood I would punch him for daring!”

For each cookie she took, the man took one too. This was infuriating her but she didn’t want to cause a scene. When only one cookie remained, she thought: “…What will this abusive man do now?”

Then, the man, taking the last cookie, divided it into half, giving her one half. "Ah! That was too much!" She was much too angry now! In a huff, she took her book, her things and stormed to the boarding place.

When she sat down in her seat, inside the plane, she looked into her purse to take her eyeglasses, and, to her surprise, her packet of cookies was there, untouched, unopened!

She felt so ashamed!! She realized that she was wrong… She had forgotten that her cookies were kept in her purse.

The man had divided his cookies with her, without feeling angered or bitter…while she had been very angry, thinking that she was dividing her cookies with him. And now there was no chance to explain herself…nor to apologize.”

There are 4 things that you cannot recover:

The stone…after the throw!

The word…after it’s said!

The occasion…after the loss!

The time…after it’s gone!

Tensions between private passions and social demands in The Awakening by Kate Chopin and The Great Gastby by Scott Fiztgerald

Tensions between private passions and social demands in The Awakening by Kate Chopin and The Great Gastby by Scott Fiztgerald

If we take into account our own life, we may often encounter several instances in which there is tension between our private passions and the social demands we have to face. This topic has been illustrated by so many novelists in their texts that even when it seems pretty simple at first sight, it hides many complexities. In order to portray the tension between private passions and social constraints, we are going to analyze Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Scott Fiztgerald’s The Great Gastby.

In the novel by Chopin, private passions and social demands and mostly comprised in the character of Edna. At first, she represents and ideal wife and then, because of her passion she turns into a rebel in society. At the beginning of Chopin’s novel, Edna struggles to keep appearances by organizing parties and trying to be a typical housewife, but little by little she realizes that that is not what she wants for her life, and she gets to a point in which “even her children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her”. In her process of “awakening” she finds out and recognizes “her relations as an individual to the world whitin and about her”. However, Edna’s awakening encounter many clashes between what her private wished represented when she awoke and what society expected from her. During this process that for many is seen as a “rebellion”, she gets to know Robert, who ends up being her lover. Robert also represents a tense situation for her between what she wantes and what she was supposed to do. Edna was married and had children, but she said she would give up the unessential for them but she was not prepared to give up herself. Edna’s passions were so strong that she even set aside not only her social duties but also her children, adding to this the fact that “there was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert!". For Edna, private passions were above everything else, even her children. She was willing to give everything to achieve them to the point ofcommiting suicide after realizing that society was not willing to accept her that way.

In the novel by Scott Fitzgerald, the tension between private passions and social constraints is mainly illustrated in the character of Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is Nick’s cousin (the narrator of the story). She is a beautiful youn lady who stands for the perfect housewife and the rich class who lives in East Egg. Daisy has chosen Tom to be her husband even though she had promised Jay she would marry him. After many years, Daisy and Jay get together again in a love affair. However, for Daisy Buchanan her social demands are more important than her private passions. She is not ready to give up her social status for Gay Gastby, even when she loves him. According to her, their love affair represents passion, curiosity, attraction but true love. For Gastby, Daisy is the woman he wants. He even gave his life for her when taking up the responsibility for having killed Mrs. Wilson with the car Daisy was driving. What is more, Daisy was not willing to make sacrifices since she moves houses after the incident even knowing that Gastby’s funeral was taking place. Daisy represents her class, her wealthy and the vices of the American society in the 20s. She strongly desires to keep appearances whenever she experiences the tensions between her private and social duties.

These two novels present different instances in which private needs exceed or go beyond social demands or constraints. However, it depends on how the author has constructed his/her character, the way his/her character would approach the topic. In the case of Chopin, she decided that the character of Edna would go deep into her soul and passions even if that meant her life. But in the case of Fitzgerald, he chose to depict a character interested in what society expected from her. Anyway, both characters, Edna and Daisy, were characterized as weak ones and in the end, none of them could stand their choices: Edna commited suicide, Daisy went back to normalcy.

Home and Identity in Beloved by Toni Morrison and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Home and Identity in Beloved by Toni Morrison and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

	Beloved	The House on Mango Street
Homes	A “Home” serves as a place to gather strenght, to formulate strategy, and to rest even when this is not enough to solve institutional and social evils. A "Home" for Esperanza is a place where she is free to be herself, which in turn, will mean a fully developed indentity.	A “home” is a place with which characters feel identified, a home characterizes who they are and it determines how they view themselves. It is a depiction of who they are inside and how they grow through life experiences.
Change of spaces	Spaces change through geographical movement, from Sweet Home to 124 Bluestone.	Spaces and homes change as characters grow. How they view things also changes.
Constraints	Home is constrained by the law, by the walls of the house, by the armed guards, by violence and trauma. A home demands for self-protection but it is not a place you can entirely rely on, it is vulnerable (school teacher / Bluestone)	The features that constrains Mexican homes in the United States are the windows of each house. Women fell trapped in their houses and they only have access to the world through the window.
Rent vs Ownership	124 Bluestone is owned by white abolitionists and rented by Baby Suggs.	Esperanza’s family have rented many houses but now they own the one in Mango Street.
Aim of home	Sethe creates in her house a space to provide warmth and sustenance to her family and yo the community	For many characters it is a place of refugee and belonging, the stories of the different characters show that they want to go back to the place they call home.
Relationship with the community	Center and heart of the Black Community, this leads to the lack of privacy. No sense of family for Baby Suggs, which is the reason why she opens the house for the community.	Their house is located in a Mexican Neighbourhood in the U.S where immigrants live and share their lives. No privacy.
The power of language	Beloved may be read as Morrison's effort to transform those who have always been the defined into the definers. Even when being slaves, the characters manipulate language and transcend its standard limits. Their command of language allows them to adjust its meanings and to make themselves indecipherable to the white slave owners who watch them.	Throughout The House on Mango Street, particularly in “No Speak English,” those who are not able to communicate effectively (or at all) are relegated to the bottom levels of society. Mamacita moves to the country to be with her husband, and she becomes a prisoner of her apartment because she does not speak English. She misses home and listens to the Spanish radio station, and she is distraught when her baby begins learning English words. His new language excludes her. Esperanza observes the people around her and realizes that if not knowing or not mastering the language creates powerlessness, then having the ability to manipulate language will give her power. She wants to change her name so that she can have power over her own destiny.
View on Women	For Baby Suggs the house provides a space for the necessary work of getting others out.	For Esperanza, Mango Street forces women into a subordinate position dominated by males who sexually manipulate women.

“THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN” BY JOHN FOWLES

METAFICTIONAL CHARACTERISTICS IN CHAPTER 13 OF

“THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN” BY JOHN FOWLES

In order to analyze metafictional characteristics in Chapter 13 of “The French Lieutenant's Woman” by John Fowles, it is necessary to define two important concepts: Postmodernism and Metaficion. Postmodernism, is a movement that emerged in the 1960’s whose main ideas were related to the rejection of boundaries between high and low forms of art, the rejection of genre distinctions, an emphasis on pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Lyotard adds to this idea the fact that, during modernity all aspects of modern societies, including science, depended on these grand narratives. Postmodernism then is the critique of grand narratives, the awareness that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent to any social organization or practice. As a consequence, minorities emerged showing a situational, provisional, and temporary, truth, reason, or stability giving birth to many genres within Postmodernism, among which we can find Metafiction. Patricia Waugh provides the following definition of the term: "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". Metafictional works, she says, are those that "explore a theory of writing fiction through the practice of writing fiction".

Chapter 13 begins "I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my mind”. In this short passage we can cleraly see one of the metafictional characteristics throguh which the author challenges the traditionl roles of the author and the reader. This is related to the authorial intimacy that the author posses, he intrudes comments in order to destroy the illusion of reality and blur the lines between fiction and reality. Another characteristict Fowles uses is the dramatization of the reader. He addresses the reader so as to make him / her aware of his / her role as player in his novel. For instance, when he says “You may think novelists always have fixed plans...” his addressing directly the reader. Furthermore, he also says “If you think that, hypocrite lecteur, I can only smile...” playing not only with the idea of addressing the reader but also with the idea of intertextuality ("The Flowers of Evil" by Jean Baudelaire-1857).

On the one hand, John Fowles considers himself a Victorian 'omniscient narrator', but he intrudes in his fiction and gives characters restricted freedom since he also gives them commands like: “When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis”. He also uses parody when writing in the manner of Victorian writers did. He re-visits the past and shows himself like “god” writer like in Victorian times but he ends up giving freedom to his novel: “The novelist is still a god, since he creates (...) What has changed is that we are no longer the Gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing...”. On the other hand, he keeps an epigraph on each of his chapters as Victorian writers did. In Chapter 13, Fowles also talks about Postmodernism and Lyotard’s idea of the fall of the grand narratives and the idea that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities of past dicourses: “So if you think all this unlucky digression has nothing to do with your Time, Progress, Society, Evolution and all those capitalized ghosts...”.

All in all, in Chapter 13 of “The French Lieutenant's Woman” by John Fowles, we can clearly see how the autor had employed all the resources and techniques that Postmodernism offered. He questioned the relationship between fiction and reality, he challenged the tradicional roles of autor ad reader, he had also payed homage to some of the techniques used by Victorian writers by employing them in his novel. Finally, he has invited the reader to play the role of a detective, to make him or her part of his fiction.

Metafiction and the Novel Tradition - Patricia Waugh

"What is Metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it?"

From Metafiction, Patricia Waugh,UK, 1984.

Patricia Waugh makes us point out the similarities amongst a selection of quotations and she lists three things readers would say:

A celebration of power of creative imagination together with an uncertainity about the validity of its representation

Literary form and the act of writing fictions

A parodic, playful, excessive or deceptively naíve style of writing.

But, the reader is offering a description of the concerns and characteristics of the fiction, so the term “Metafiction” needs to be defined:

“Metafiction is a term given to a fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its satus as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship of fiction to reality”

So, Waugh claims that such writings not only examine the fundamental structure of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text

NOVELS EXPLORE THE THEORY OF FICTION THROUGH THE PRACTICE OF WRITING FICTION.

Metafiction poses questions through its formal self-exploration, drawing on the traditional metaphor of the world as book.

Consequently, if our knowledge of the world (as individuals) is now seen to be mediated through language, then literary fiction becomes a useful model for learning about the construction of “reality” itself.

According to Waugh, “Language is an independant self-contained system which generates its own meanings. Its realtionship to the phenomenal world is highly complex, problematic and regulted by convention. Meta terms, therefore, are required in order to explore the relationship between this arbitrary linguistic system and the world to which it apparently refers”.

World OF fiction = World OUTSIDE fiction

The dilemma Metafiction sets out to explore: How is it possible to “describe” anything?

If the writer sets out to “represent” the world, he or she would realize that the world as such, cannot be “represented”. They can only “represent” the DISCOURSES of that world.

Hjelmslev deveolped the term “Metalanguage”: “Language which, instead of referring to non-linguistic events, situations or obejcts in the world, refers to another language: it is a language which takes another as its objects”.

In Saussure’s terms, a “metalanguage” is a language that functions as a signifier to another language, and this other language becomes its signified.

So, in the process of writing, what is explored is the problematic realtionship between life and fiction.

Metafiction pays attention to particular conventions of the novel by which the process of its construction is displayed. Novels attempt to create alternative linguistic structures or fictions which imply the old forms by encouraging the reader to draw on his or her knowledge of traditional literary conventions when struggling to construct a meaning for the new text.

Metafiction and the novel tradition

Patricia Waugh argues that, “… the term “Metafiction” might be new, the practice is as old (if not older) than the novel itself…metafiction is a tendency or function inherent in all novels”

Novels are constructed on the principle of fundamental and sustained opposition:

CONSTRUCTION OF AN ILLUSION à LAYING BARE OF THAT ILLUSION

This is done so, in order to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction. Writers feel that any attempt to represent reality an only produce selective perspectives.

As a consequence of this, more and more novelists question and reject forms that correspond to ordered reality:

Novel tradition

A well-made plot

Chronological sequence

Authoritative omniscient narator

Rational connections

Atmosphere of certainty

Metafictional writings

The process of constructing the world is more important than the plot

Unimportance of sequence & details

Non rational connections

Plurality of Voices

Atmosphere of uncertainity