Truth and Metafiction: Plasticity and Renewal in American Narrative

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Metafiction has long been associated with the heyday of literary postmodernismwith a certain sense of irresponsibility, political apathy, or outright nihilism. Yet, if (as is now widely assumed) postmodernism has finally run its course, how might we account for the proliferation of metafictional devices in contemporary narrative media Does this persistence undermine the claim that postmodernism has passed, or has the function of metafiction somehow changed To answer these questions, Josh Toth considers a broad range of recent metafictional textsbywriters such as George Saunders and Jennifer Egan and directors such as Sofia Coppola and Quentin Tarantino. At the same time, he traverses a diffuse theoretical landscape: from the rise of various new materialisms (in philosophy) and the turn to affect (in literary criticism) to the seemingly endless efforts to name postmodernisms ostensible successor. Ultimately, Toth argues that much contemporary metafiction moves beyond postmodern skepticism to reassert the possibility of making true claims about real things. Capable of combating a post-truth crisis, such forms assert or assume a kind of Hegelian plasticity; they actively and persistently confront the trauma of what is infinitely mutable, or perpetually other. What is outside or before a given representation is confirmed and endured as that which exceeds the instance of its capture. The truth is thereby renewed; neither denied nor simply assumed, it is approached as ethically as possible. Its plasticity is grasped because the grasp, the form of its narrative apprehension, lets slip.

Reviews

Bringing out the heavy philosophical artillery of the 21st-century return to Hegel, Toth makes a very strong case for recuperating metafiction in the era since postmodernism. Deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking, Toths book is bound to shift the current scholarly discussion about metafictional narrative. * Brian McHale, Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor, Department of English, The Ohio State University, USA *
Building on his influential work on postmodernism, Josh Toth takes up in his new and trailblazing monograph the intricate and timely issue of metafiction and its proliferation after the postmodern heyday, making a compelling case for postmodernisms complex transformation in todays U. S. metafictional prose and cinema. Thoroughly researched, impeccably argued, and superbly written, Truth and Metafiction is and will remain for years to come required reading for anyone interested in why and how formally and thematically self-aware fiction and film ultimately, if tentatively, do give us access to the worlds concreteness, affective substance, authenticity, and truth. * Christian Moraru, Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of American Literature and Critical Theory, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA, and author of Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary *
Truth and Metafiction confirms Toth as one of the most insightful and ambitious readers of contemporary fiction, film, and philosophy. As an account of what has happened to American literature and cinema in the post-Truth era, and how a rediscovery of Hegel might save us from our skepticism, this formulation of historioplastic metafiction is astute and compelling. * David Rudrum, Senior Lecturer, University of Huddersfield, UK, and author of Supplanting the Postmodern (Bloomsbury, 2015) *

Author Bio

Josh Toth is Associate Professor of English at MacEwan University, Canada. He is author of Stranger America: A Narrative Ethics of Exclusion (2018) and The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary (2010).