Metafiction Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Michael Dunne

Critical Essay by Michael Dunne

SOURCE: Dunne, Michael. “Stardust Memories, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the Tradition of Metafiction.” Film Criticism 12, no. 1 (fall 1987): 19-27.

In the following essay, Dunne finds parallels between John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and Woody Allen's film The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) has the same relation to romantic film comedy as radical post-modern writing such as John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1967) has to traditional prose fiction. The chief parallel stems from the fact that, faced with outmoded conventional forms, Allen—like Barth—ironically raises doubts about the effectiveness of his medium in order to achieve a new sort of aesthetic order. Robert Scholes has called fiction that challenges its own premises in this way “metafiction,” and we may follow Scholes in calling The Purple Rose a “metafilm.” Terminology is less important, however, than a recognition that Allen has...
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