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

Don Quijote and the Neuroscience of MetafictionWhat is metafiction? Its original meaning was a fiction that both creates an illusionand lays beam that illusion.1 But the term has expanded and expanded to include anyfiction that even nurtures the idea of fiction. That can cover a lot of things, scratch with theIliad.2Id same to go back to the original idea. In my understanding, metafictions tell storiesin which the physical medium of the story becomes part of the story. Among contemporarywriters 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 questioningcenturies, the twentieth and twenty-first. But, from previous times, one could direct toDiderots Jacques le Fataliste or Sternes Tristram Shandy. The events of Tristram Shandyinclude the very copy of Tristram Shandy I am holding in my hand.Metafi ctions lead to some of the more dizzying cause possible in literature. In DorisLessings The Golden Notebook, for example, one of the notebooks tells about a novelisttrying to write a novel. A friend asks her to give him the first sentence, and the novelistrattles aside the first sentence of The Golden Notebook itself.Drama--metadrama--gets this effect in the metatheatrical tradition of Pirandellos SixCharacters in Search of an Author or Henry IV, and many of the absurdists like Genet or1Ionesco or Weiss, in which characters point to the play they are acting in. In movies, youcould also point to Woody Allens Purple rose of Cairo or Bergmans Persona or AlejandroAmenbar, Abre los Ojos, and espcially Sp... ...e from Linear Time Prefrontal Cortex andConscious Experience. In The Cognitive Neurosciences, ed. Michael S.Gazzaniga, 135771. Cambridge MA MIT Press, 1995.Llins, Rodolfo R. The I of the Vortex From Neurons to Self. Cambridge MA MIT Press,2001.Passingham, Richard. The Frontal Lo bes 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 toUnderstanding the Neural Basis of Emotion. The Cognitive Neurosciences. Ed.Michael S. Gazzaniga. Cambridge MA MIT P, 1995. 1091-1106.Scott, A. O. Forever Obsessing About Obsession. Review of Jonze, Adaptation. The NewYork Times, 6 December 2002, Section E, Column 1, Page 1.Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New YorkRoutledge, 1984.