Taking Meta to Another Level: Experimental Self-Reflexivity in Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales (2014)

Description

This paper explores the experimental use of self-reflexivity in Telling Tales (2014) by Patience Agbabi, a contemporary take on Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval Canterbury Tales. Katrijn Van den Bossche follows Sarah Upstone’s (2015, 292) argument that self-reflexivity can function as “a strategy in the service of identity politics” and pursues a revision of previous theories of metafiction that have dissociated self-reflexivity from political engagement. Agbabi highlights contemporary crises of form and culture – e.g. crises of belonging and of commercial art – through self-reflexive devices such as mise-en-abyme, reader addresses, typefaces, embedded intertextuality, etc. Moreover, the metalevel of each individual poem is amplified by the work’s frame and often results in a foregrounding or subversion of generic conventions of the traditional tales. Thus, drawing on theories concerning genre, feminism, and postcolonialism, this paper argues that self-reflexivity can function as a catalyst for generic change and aims to delineate the political, cultural, and aesthetic functions of metafiction.

Period	1 Mar 2023 → 4 Mar 2023
Event title	2023 International Conference on Narrative
Event type	Conference
Location	Dallas, United States, Texas
Degree of Recognition	International