SOURCE: Landau, Iddo. “Metafiction as a Rhetorical Device in Hegel's History of Absolute Spirit and Gabriel García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude.” CLIO 21, no. 4 (1992): 401-10.

In the following essay, Landau contrasts the use of metafiction as a rhetorical device in Hegel's history of “Absolute Spirit” and García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

“Metafiction” has been defined as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.”¹ Of course, many literary works include some element of self-awareness or self-reference. However, the term “metafiction” is usually applied only to those cases in which the self-relation is used to undermine our traditional understanding of the distinction between fiction and reality. Metafiction shows the rhetorical power to do so by relating a fictional work to itself, by including discussions...