Meta-Fiction, Parody, and The [Basque] Apocalypse Revealed to All

The literary and cultural scholar Joseba Gabilondo has exerted considerable influence on the field of Basque and Iberian Literary Studies. His scholarly work often generating attention for his opinions expressed about canonical Basque Literature and authors. This article returns to his publication of Apokalipsia guztioi erakutsia. Although the book obtained the "Erein Narratiba" award in 2009, the collection gained no scholarly attention and hardly received any critical reviews. But recent changes have occasioned a second look, an in-depth critical reading, that seems timelier than ever. The literary scholar Gabilondo would, of course, agree; since, as he conceded to Gorka Erostarbe in a recent interview concerning, among other issues, the Covid-19 pandemic: "Our new horizon is not history, but apocalypse". Gabilondo fictionally scaffolds his reflections on issues that have long concerned him as an intellectual and have occupied most, if not all, of his scholarly work. The lack of worldliness and roundness of his fictional proposal in favor of a literature-of-ideas does not do away with the overwhelming impression the reader is left with. Indeed, we have been the recipients of a shrewd revelation. Admittedly, a revelation that twinges the reader who shares the author's fears.

Epilogue

This study ends where it began, with the particularities of the children’s context when it comes to considering metafiction, transmediation of meta-fiction to children’s film, and adaptation itself. The important role of metafiction in children’s reading is central to an understanding of the particular pressures brought to bear on its adaptation, particularly to other (screen) media....

The Concept of Metalepsis and Classifications of Metaleptic Uses in TV Commercials

Metalepsis is a term originated in ancient legal discourse and integrated into narrative theory by Gérard Genette to describe crossovers between narrative levels. Since Genette's definition, various typologies of metalepsis have been devised by narratologists and literary scholars. As a narrative tool which challenges the hierarchical organization and violates the boundaries between levels, metalepsis has different effects and functions depending on the contexts in which it occurs. The aim of the study is to determine the typology of the metaleptic uses in TV commercials. Metalepsis is consciously produced in the advertisement and gives it richness in terms of creativity; and the emergence as follows; interaction with voice over and character, the intervention of the voice over to the plot, the intervention of the character to the screen, the intervention of characters in different places, interaction with character and audience, and meta-fiction.

‘The word is incest’:1 Narrative, affect and judgement in and across the Lolitas

Through intertext, adaptation, nominative re-births and epiphanies, Lolita (1955) enacts a kind of incestuous narcissism, a self-consuming act of libidinality and linguistic desire that offers a fantasy of self-exculpation and discovery, a narrative of abuse and trauma, and a meta-fiction that revels in the performative perversions its characters suffer from. Each part of the novel is born of an incestuous relationship with an earlier (part of the) text, every subsequent re-statement of Lolita carries this textual-familial weight.This essay frames an analysis of the novel and its two filmic daughters in the light of these three strands: a realist fantasy of a man’s maniac relationship with a girl who becomes his daughter and sexual partner; his ‘confession’, her distorted trauma tale; the various formal, stylistic, intertextual “incests” that stand in dizzying juxtaposition to the ‘ethical impact’ assigned to it by the pre-facing John Ray Jr.

Posthumanist Magic

Tony Vinci explains how Lev Grossman’s The Magicians suggests a new way of reading YA fantasy, not just as a privileged anthropocentric human reading escapist literature, reifying the boundary between reality and fantasy. Since the now-commodified set of expectations for fantasy to be unsettling are no longer as effective for readers, Grossman’s meta-fiction enables readers to view all realities as linguistic constructs. Thus when Quentin Coldwater and his magicians-in-training friends cross over into Narnia-like Fillory, they are encouraged to acknowledge the porous border between reality and fantasy, to recognize the “posthumanist ethics of vulnerability and radical openness to the Other, within and without.” But Quentin resists, even as a magical animal-human, clinging to traditional humanist values, and refuses to experience “becoming-with Otherness.”