(Post)Modernist Levels of Authority in Reflexive Fiction

Résumé

Most postmodernist novels cease to even pretend they believe in the direct mirroring in the text of a purely linguistic construction of reality. In metafictional writings, the focus is on the plurality of meaning due to the inherent plurality of language, effect of a plural reality, the negociation being made between the text and the reader, the (re)producer of meaning. Fictionalising the world via the media makes the “realistic” attitude of postmodernist writers presuppose acknowledgment and assumation of the constructed character of reality; thus, however paradoxical it may seem, postmodernist prose becomes mimetic but in a completely different way than the realistic prose of the 19th century.