Enhancing the critical apparatus for understanding metanarration

This article explores the deictic functioning of metanarrative expressions in fiction. Current theoretical approaches to metanarration are reviewed, and classifying terminology revised. This critique enables the development of a more nuanced typology of metanarration, exposes the lack of linguistic analysis of the functioning of metanarrative expressions, and indicates the deictic contribution to this functioning. The role of deixis within metanarration is then further explicated. The category of discourse deixis is investigated and refined, and various subtypes of discourse deixis correlated with subtypes of metanarrative expressions. The analytical value of this approach is demonstrated through the study of discourse deixis in metanarrative extracts from Beckett's (Pan Books, 1979 [1959]) The unnameable , Federman's (Fiction Collective, 1976) Take it or leave it and Barth's (Random House, 1988 [1969]) Lost in the funhouse

Deixis · Metanarrative · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Samuel Beckett and Modernism · Translation Studies and Practices