Metafiction on Screen

Afterword by Garrett Stewart

Rather than treating the “meta” merely as a postmodern trick, clever rhetorical device, or symptom of cultural exhaustion, David LaRocca asks in Metafiction on Screen why artists return so persistently to configurations that stage and disclose their own nature—and why audiences find such revelations absorbing. Locating metafiction’s source in the doubleness of human self-awareness, the book traces the meta from cinema’s earliest reflexive gestures through modernist metalepsis, avant-garde moving-image art, postmodern reflexivity, contemporary television, and digital media. Bringing philosophy into conversation with film criticism, literary theory, media studies, aesthetics, and narratology, LaRocca moves between close readings and large-scale cultural analysis, attending to edits, shots, gestures, dialogue, frames within frames, genre conventions, and serial patterns. Erudite yet accessible, Metafiction on Screen shows how cinema and television transform representation into reflection, returning viewers to the aesthetic, technological, and historical pressures from which screen worlds are made.

David LaRocca is the author or contributing editor of twenty-one books, including The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, The Philosophy of Documentary Film, Werner Herzog / Rogue Filmmaker, and from Oxford University Press, Metacinema. His website is www.davidlarocca.org