The post-metafiction turn — self-reference exhausted, the "fall into time"
echoes
From: Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young
- Early text: metafiction and minimalism as "simple engines of
self-reference", "self-reference being just a tiny wrinkled subset of
aboutness"; the cutting edge's "fall into time, a loss of innocence about the
language that is its breath and bread"; "We are the recipients of a knife
unprecedentedly vulnerable to its own blade". [the closing sections] [e-text]
- IJ echo: Wallace's move beyond self-referential metafiction toward a
fiction of meaning and feeling — the post-postmodern stance the archive tracks
in the Westward/EUP lineage and in IJ's refusal of pure irony. The essay is the
early statement that self-reference is "a tiny wrinkled subset of aboutness",
the diagnosis IJ answers with a maximal, other-directed book.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation (oeuvre-aesthetic)