Don Quijote and the Neuroscience of Metafiction Essay -- Quixote Migue

Don Quijote and the Neuroscience of Metafiction What is metafiction? Its original meaning was "a fiction that both creates an illusion and lays bare that illusion."1 But the term has expanded and expanded to include any fiction that even mentions the idea of fiction. That can cover a lot of things, starting with the Iliad.2 I'd like to go back to the original idea. In my understanding, metafictions tell stories in which the physical medium of the story becomes part of the story. Among contemporary writers of fiction one could mention: my erstwhile colleagues John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Ray Federman. Others are Borges, Calvino, Nabokov, Umberto Eco, John Fowles, Salman Rushdie, and on and on. Metafiction has become very popular in our questioning centuries, the twentieth and twenty-first. But, from previous times, one could point to Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste or Sterne's Tristram Shandy. The events of Tristram Shandy include the very copy of Tristram Shandy I am holding in my hand. Metafictions lead to some of the more dizzying effects possible in literature. In Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, for example, one of the notebooks tells about a novelist trying to write a novel. A friend asks her to give him the first sentence, and the novelist rattles off the first sentence of The Golden Notebook itself. Drama--metadrama--gets this effect in the metatheatrical tradition of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author or Henry IV, and many of the absurdists like Genet or 1 Ionesco or Weiss, in which characters point to the "play" they are acting in. In movies, you could also point to Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo or Bergman's Persona or Alejandro Amenà ¡bar, Abre los Ojos, and espcially Sp... ...e from Linear Time: Prefrontal Cortex and Conscious Experience.† In The Cognitive Neurosciences, ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga, 1357–71. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995. Llinà ¡s, Rodolfo R. The I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001. Passingham, Richard. The Frontal Lobes and Voluntary Action. Oxford Psychology Series 21. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1993. Rolls, Edmund T. "A Theory of Emotion and Consciousness, and Its Application to Understanding the Neural Basis of Emotion." The Cognitive Neurosciences. Ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga. Cambridge MA: MIT P, 1995. 1091-1106. Scott, A. O. â€Å"Forever Obsessing About Obsession.† Review of Jonze, Adaptation. The New York Times, 6 December 2002, Section E, Column 1, Page 1. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1984.