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
Historically, metafiktionale practices emerged with modernist and postmodern experimentation and have become widespread in contemporary fiction
Beyond literature, metafiktionale tendencies appear in films and television that acknowledge storytelling techniques, or in video