ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, ‘Discourse Deixis in Metanarration’, presents a typology of metanarration, drawing on and merging prior models, and prioritising the focus of metanarrative comments as a principle of categorisation. This principle allows metanarration to be broken down into the metatextual, the metacompositional, the metadiegetic, the metanarrative, and the metadiscursive. Examples of each of these types of metanarration are analysed through a range of extracts from John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1988 [1968]), Brigid Brophy’s In Transit: A Heroi-Cyclic Novel (2002 [1969]), Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants (2011 [1969], John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1996 [1969]), B. S. Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (2001 [1973]), and Steve Katz’s The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (2017 [1968]). These analyses draw out the contribution made by discourse deixis to the effects of metanarration in each case. This investigation also facilitates new insights into the role of discourse deixis in bridging implicit and explicit metanarration and in endowing the former with intracompositional metanarrative meaning.
