Fabulation & Metafiction (1979) – Robert Scholes
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Robert E. Scholes is an American literary critic and theorist. He is known for his ideas on fabulation and metafiction.
He graduated from Yale University. Since 1970 he has been Professor at Brown University.
With Eric S. Rabkin he published in 1977 the book Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision, which considerably influenced the science fiction studies. In it, they attempt to explain the literary history of the genre, but also the sciences such as physics and astronomy. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scholes [Oct 2006]
Robert Scholes also wrote the foreword to Todorov’s The Fantastic (1970).
Some hold that Scholes coined the term metafiction in Fabulation and Metafiction (1979):
“Metafiction assimilates all the perspectives of criticism into the fictional process itself,” but it also “tends toward brevity because it attempts … to assault or transcend the laws of fiction”
Others claim that the term was coined by William H. Gass:
The term “metafiction” has remained enigmatic and vague since it was coined in 1970 by William H. Gass in an essay entitled “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction”. Commenting on American fiction of the 1960s, Gass pointed out that a new term was needed for the emerging genre of experimental texts that openly broke with the tradition of literary realism still dominant in post-WW II American literature. —http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=715 [Oct 2006]
Metafiction assimilates all the perspectives of criticism into the fictional process itself. It may emphasize structural, formal, behavioral, or philosophical qualities, but most writers of metafiction are thoroughly aware of all these possibilities and are likely to have experimented with all of them…. [Consider] four works of metafiction by four American writers: John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Donald Barthelme’s City Life, Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants, and W. H. …–Bookrags
In literary criticism, the term fabulation was popularized by Robert Scholes, in his work The Fabulators, to describe the large and growing class of mostly 20th century novels that are in a style similar to magical realism, and do not fit into the traditional categories of realism or (novelistic) romance. They violate, in a variety of ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic—and sometimes highly successful—experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, fantastic, mythical, and nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabulation [Oct 2006]
