Geographic Metafiction. Parodying the Spatial Archive in Speculative Literature and Film

Abstract

In her seminal work on historiographic metafiction, Linda Hutcheon notes that postmodern literature is characterized by self-reflectivity, parody, and intertextuality. What distinguishes her definition from other summations is the argument that postmodern literature does not only signal a self-conscious engagement with literature but also with history. Accordingly, she writes that “[t]‌he term postmodernism, when used in fiction, should […] best be reserved to describe fiction that is at once metafictional and historical in its echoes of the texts and contexts of the past” (Hutcheon 3; emphasis in original). The incorporation of fictional and historical intertexts “offers a sense of the presence of the past, but this is a past that can only be known from its texts, its traces – be they literary or historical” (4). To illustrate her idea, Hutcheon cites novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez 1967), Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut 1969), and The Name of the Rose (Eco 1980) which “put into question the authority of any act of writing by locating the discourses of both history and fiction within an ever-expanding intertextual network that mocks any notion of either single origin or simple causality” (Hutcheon 12). These works reconstruct the past only to parody it, challenging history’s problematic relationship with reality, objectivity, and universality.