SOURCE: Lawrence, Karen R. “Saving the Text: Cultural Crisis in Textermination and Masterpiece Theatre.” Narrative 5, no. 1 (January 1997): 108-16.

In the following essay, Lawrence examines the parallels between Textermination and the dramatic performance Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama, written by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Describing both as examples of women's metafiction, Lawrence compares the narrative strategies of the two works, concluding that Textermination acts as a more effective piece of cultural critique.

In an essay entitled “Where Do We Go from Here?” Christine Brooke-Rose borrows a definition of “metafiction” from Mas'ud Zavarzadeh's The Mythopoeic Reality—The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel (1976): metafiction, she quotes, is “‘ultimately a narrational metatheorem whose subject matter is fictional systems themselves [… It] exults over its own fictitiousness,’ and its main counter-techniques are flat characterization, contrived plots, antilinear sequences of events, all fore-grounded as part of an extravagant overtotalization, a parody of interpretation which shows...