Confounding the Mimetic: The Metafictional Challenge to Representation
Confounding the Mimetic: The Metafictional Challenge to Representation
This chapter considers the one-to-one correspondence between fiction and the world many readers of realist fiction expect and even desire. More specifically, this chapter examines Salvador Plascencia’s metafictional novel The People of Paper to show how it disrupts these desires for mimetic fidelity and emphasizes instead an interest in the very nature of fiction. It is, in short, a story about story in which the characters and the narrator are in a battle over omniscience and who gets to tell one’s story. Finally, the chapter analyzes how the production of Latino circulates in a novel that refuses to obey the properties of realism. In so doing, it forces readers out of mundane positions in evaluating whether a work of fiction accurately, positively, or authentically represents the community they might wish for it to represent.
Keywords: Latinx, metafiction, mimesis, realism
Fordham Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
