SOURCE: Kennedy, Thomas E. “Fiction as Its Own Subject: An Essay and Two Examples—Anderson's ‘Death in the Woods’ and Weaver's ‘The Parts of Speech.’” Kenyon Review 9, no. 3 (summer 1987): 59-70.

In the following essay, Kennedy examines two little-known works of short metafiction—Sherwood Anderson's “Death in the Woods” and Gordon Weaver's “The Parts of Speech.”

The terms “metafiction” and “self-reflexive fiction” have been used to denote fiction's deliberately self-conscious employment of technique to bolster the deteriorated equipment of more conventional methods with which the art is concealed. Thus, for example, Barth employs anti-illusion as an instrument of illusion enhancement; Fowles offers alternate endings following a point-counterpoint of fiction and fact to dramatize the nature of existential choice; Calvino fabricates an interweave of reality and illusion which leaves the reader wondering over the juncture of illusion in his own reality-fiction. Conventional plot and linear story are cast aside as...