Informations du cours

Novels about novel writing, authors writing about authors, poems about poetry, plays about the theatre – there are many forms of literary self-reflectivity, often subsumed under the name of metafiction. This seminar will, over two semesters, explore the manifold ways in which writers use their work to engage with authorship, fiction, the act of writing, and the relation between literature and ‘the world’. In this semester, we will focus on texts dating from the Romantic until and including the Modernist period. We will look at a wide range of texts – mainly narrative – that develop such a metafictional dimension and will explore theoretical approaches that help us understand the forms and functions of metafictional writing, even in the earlier periods. Authors to be discussed in this semester are Laurence Sterne, Thomas Carlyle, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Riddell, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett.

This course is not a prerequisite for attending the second part, dealing with 20^th and 21^st-century literature, in spring 2027.

In the end: 

• Students can give persuasive accounts, orally and in writing, of theoretical approaches to metafiction.
• Students can apply these concepts to literary texts from different historical periods.
• Students can apply relevant theoretical terminology to their analysis of literary texts.