SOURCE: "Empty 'Text,' Fecund Voice: Self-Reflexivity in Barth's Lost in the Funhouse," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 26, No. 4, Winter, 1985, pp. 460-81.

In the excerpt below, Woolley argues that self-consciousness in Lost in the Funhouse presents an affirmative interpretation of narrative reflexivity.

In contemporary criticism a myth has emerged, wherein narrative literature, released from its bondage to novelistic convention and mimetic tradition, becomes the freeplay of language speaking to itself, infinitely reflecting and rewriting its own structures. The "text," figured in the critical mythology as "parafiction," "surfiction," "metafiction," écriture, "antinovel," nouveau roman, nouveau nouveau roman, and so forth, is envisioned as an "absence" undercutting the sense of presence that language evokes. Thus, according to [Phillippe] Sollers, a text "n'apparaît que pour s'effacer et réciter apparition qui s'efface ("appears only in order to erase itself and to recite this apparition which erases itself"). By constantly playing upon the...