Transition Of Narrative In Taiwan Meta-fiction

Meta-fiction is not new phenomenon by any means, but its ubiquity in all the arts of this century has seemed to necessitate a reassessment of its nature and functions. To be specific, meta-fiction strategically reveals the postmodern in paradox in a way that it installs and subverts the very initial concepts. In other words, it tries to raise an issue of how to "use and abuse" the "target text," which in due course, "another work of art or, more generally, another coded discourse". The emergence of meta-fiction in Taiwan during the 80's has changed. The realistic novel was challenged and faced exposure to fictional writing strategies, which indirectly reflects the relationship between language and reality. Besides, self-reflexivity is an important feature that characterize of meta-fiction. Meta-fiction can be described as predominantly a strategy in writing "fiction about fiction" (my coinage). In this thesis what I try to do is to cite some appropriate examples from Zhang Dachun and Luo Yijun some meta-fictional works. This thesis consists of three parts, and each part comprises three chapters. The first part respectively reviews the theories of meta-fiction as well as its relationship to post-modernism in Taiwan. So that having examined the theories of meta-fiction and its relation to postmodernism, I try to analyze in part II, Zhang Dachun's meta-fictions, which challenge some realistic conventions in fiction, such as chronological plots and omniscient narrators. Furthermore, it foregrounds the post-modern paradox by installing and subverting the text it parodies. In part III, I explore Luo Yijun's some novels, a complex and lengthy meta-fiction, through a discussion of its narrative the meta-fictional paradox, for it foregrounds the process of constructing a fictional illusion of the provisional boundaries between art and life, fiction and criticism, authorship and readership, as well as the strategies of deconstructing that illusion. To prove my theory that Luo's meta-fictions are never to talk about national family fable or myth, but the internal construction of the novel itself, have to face up dehors of sign. In Luo's fictions intentionally dramatizes several problematic aspects of the novel as genre while narrating the story, such as the palimpsest/inter-textual sources and multiple narrative points of view. In each text of the palimpsest sources of the novel, one text is set over another text and one text is read through another text. More complicatedly, in each text there is an Author physically outside the text and a fictional self--the authorial mediator--inside the text. Last but not least, an analysis of the strength and weakness of meta-fictions in Taiwan are demonstrated in this thesis as conclusion.