metanarrative
- noun
- /ˌmɛtəˈnærətɪv/
- Literature
:
metanarrativa
- Art historians who attempt to articulate a new metanarrative of the history of Philippine art in a globalized world are challenged by migrations, dislocations, and blurred identities suspended in diaspora.
- metanarrative text
Examples
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We want to argue, however, that the text resists easy assimilation into a pattern provided by any one psychoanalytic metanarrative.
Academic text (1994) -
The hope of one single unified guiding metanarrative gives way to an infinite number of fragmented and heterogeneous narrative configurations.
Academic text (2000) -
No totalizing metanarrative will suffice.
Academic text (2000) -
By monitoring the construction of the possible worlds of the reader, the metanarrative text creates an additional level of fabula.
Academic text (1992) -
These metanarrative statements become increasingly metafictional and metaleptic in quality.
Academic text (2003) -
According to Eco's metanarrative reading, the text sacrifices its own logic in order to expose the reader's faulty reasoning.
Academic text (1992) -
While the content of these stories is distinctive, in order to fully appreciate their complex meanings and functions, it proves essential to explore not only the plot, but also narrators' roles, the management of reported speech, metanarrative cues, and multiple contexts of telling.
Academic text (2017) -
Where Amelie saw only emptiness and lack of substance, Bernard was able to see the potential for forming a self signified in narrative, but this narrative too lacks the authority of a metanarrative.
Academic text (2000) -
Likewise, the myth (as opposed to the explanation of it) ends with a message, "you are a wolf, you should remain a wolf" (lines 169-170), and so the metanarrative continues, "that wolf he had made a decision as to what... did he want to be, you know" (lines 172-173; some emphases added).
Academic text (2017) -
In his lecture, the professor explained how the metanarrative shapes our understanding of historical events.
Synonyms
1
8.9
A story that reminds people they are reading it
How Self-Referential
Surface Forms
Morphology
Etymology
Metanarrative comes from the prefix meta- meaning 'about' or 'beyond' (as in metadata) and narrative meaning 'story'. So a metanarrative in fiction is a 'story about stories' that points to or talks about the act of telling the story itself.