Metafiktionale

Metafiktionale refers to narrative strategies that reveal or foreground the fictionality of a work. In German-language criticism, metafiktionale Elemente describe scenes, devices or voices that remind readers that they are reading a constructed story. The aim is self-reflexivity: the work calls attention to its own status as representation rather than a direct report on an external reality.

Common techniques include a narrator who comments on the act of storytelling, characters who recognize their fictional status, metafictional comments on the writing process, and structures such as books within a book, footnotes, or paratextual materials. Metafiktion and metalepsis can appear as direct address, unreliable narration, or intertextual games that blur boundaries between author, narrator, and reader.

Historically, metafiktionale practices emerged with modernist and postmodern experimentation and have become widespread in contemporary fiction and media. Notable examples in Western literature include Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, which plays with the act of reading; Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, which foregrounds the apparatus of commentary; Jorge Luis Borges's self-referential fictions; and John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse.

Beyond literature, metafiktionale tendencies appear in films and television that acknowledge storytelling techniques, or in video games that converse with players about narrative structures. The term describes a broad class of self-reflexive strategies that probe what fiction is and how it operates, rather than merely telling a story.