Revision as of 03:07, 8 September 2007

Provisorische uralte Infos über mich: http://www.grimoires.de/inhalt.php?art=team&nr=1

Proposal Magisterarbeit (in work)

NOTE: Will be reworked down to one book (the 5th/6th according to the book itself). Should be able to do this by Saturday evening, i.e. today evening

Metafiction and Intertextuality in Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Next” Series

In a 2005 article, Erica Hateley (University of Melbourne) published an article on The Eyre Afair and its relation to Jane Eyre. In this article, she mainly explores the relation of the two novels with special regard to the mimicking instances of Fforde’s novel going as far as to identify the protagonist as a recurring Jane, which is on some levels certainly true. Since that article, 4 more books have been published and thus furthered the “Next Universe”. While being “popular literature” in the realm of the Fantastic, there are more points of interest then were explored by Hateley, who dealt exclusively with the Jane Eyre/The Eyre Affair relation. Some of her points can be taken up though

The world of the novels is a world with a thin line between literature and life; the complete Shakespeare is placed in hotel rooms together with the Bible and other religious books; streetfights between Surrealists and Realists, Marlowians and Baconists are not unusal; new artforms get abolished; and even the crossing of the border between fiction and reality became possible, which Hately describes “a reified form of intertextuality”. Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” has come true and solidified. While belonging to the popular literature, the “high” culture is taken very seriously in Fforde’s universe. This seriousness is often iterated in the form of parody, all in all it is a “realist narration that is inflected through the fantastic” (1024). The core of the “classic” texts can be observed in all novels and mostly it is clear which novel(s) form(s) the major background for the respective novel – although never a similarity got as strong again as in the first; Genette’s hypertextuality does not really fit. In any case one question will be if the author does not only indulges himself in clever allusions – doubtlessly the series “presumes a certain level of reader competence” as Hately states.

In further novels largely expand on the “BookWorld”. This is the world in which the characters live, who are categorised into classes and governed by the Council of Genres et. al. Most notably, there is “Jurisfiction” the Literary Detectives who ensure that all plots run properly. In this metafictional background, Fforde more and more addresses issues of the actual literary apparatus: he applies criticism to books, by their own characters or others; he reinterprets; he plays with conventions, layouts (“Lorem Ipsum” as actual language) and other physical parts of books. Most interestingly, he develops a model of the creation of books in which the author seemingly vanishes and is replaced by an – lastly unexplained – “imaginotransference” device; the real work is given to the reader. The books itself are created inside the BookWorld and the process is likened to both the construction of a giant engine and the (repetitive) performance of a play. In this context, author-text-reader relationships will have to be analysed in a postmodern environment. Does Fforde take the ideas of this literary theory and plays with them? Art there further instances?

The metafiction finally (so far) culminates into the appearance of the books of the series itself in the books (including an allegedly totally obliterated one), creating a mise-en-abyme par excellence, after a lot “lesser” creation of this kind. This, happening in the fifth (sixth?) book, will be another point to look at, together with the question of de facto biographical novels that are thematised in the same issue.

Above all though, there is the question how the intertextual and the metafiction (and also allusion to other “high culture” achievements of our world) are linked together. Is there a central running theme concerning literature in literature; does the presented view change among the series? What aspects does the “cultural conservativism” in- and exclude; how does it deal with canons? Does the inside-genesis of books relate to the “death of the author”? How does the series play and instrumental the literary apparatus leading from author to printer, publisher, and reader, not leaving out the usual place for advertisement after the end of the story itself? How is intertextuality made use of? And finally, can Fforde’s novels be characterised as “postmodern” novels? Are they still novels with the “version updates” he provides on his website and directly advertises at the very beginning of his story?

Preliminary Bibliography

Primary Literature:

Fforde, Jasper: The Eyre Affair. London: Hodder & Stoughton 2001.

Fforde, Jasper: Lost in a Good Book. London: Hodder & Stoughton 2002.

Fforde, Jasper: The Well of Lost Plots. London: Hodder & Stoughton 2003.

Fforde Jasper: Something Rotten. London: Hodder & Stoughton 2004.

Fforder Jasper: First Among Sequels. London: Hodder & Stoughton 2007.

Secondary Literature:

Barthes, Roland: Der Tod des Autors. In: Texte zur Theorie der Autorschaft. Ed. Fotis Jannidis et. al. Stuttgart: Reclam 2003. pp. 181-93.

Bourdieu, Pierre: The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Clarendon Press 1989.

Bourdieu, Pierre; Jean-Claude Passeron: Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Sage, 1990.

Dentith, Simon: Parody. The New Critical Idiom. Ed John Drakakis. London: Routledge 2000.

Flieger, Jerry Aline: Postmodern Perspective: The Paranoid Eye. New Literary History 28 (1997): 87-109.

Hateley, Erica, "The End of The Eyre Affair: Jane Eyre, Parody, and Popular Culture", Journal of Popular Culture, 38:6 (2005 Nov), pp. 1022-36. Accessed 25/06/2007 via <http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2005.00174.x>

?Hutcheon, Linda: A Theory of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge 1996.

Hutcheon, Linda: A Theory of Parody. 2nd ed. London: Methuen 1985.

Hutcheon, Linda: Narcissistic Narrative. The metafictional paradox. London: Methuen 1985.

Lanier, Douglas: Shakespeare and Modern Populr Culture. Oxford Shakespeare topics. Ed. Stanley Wells. Oxford: Oxford UP 2002.

Pratchett, Terry: Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories. Folkoler October (2002): 159-68.

Stoneman, Patsy: Bronte Transformtions: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1996.