Metafiction on Screen

Rather than treating the "meta" merely as a postmodern trick, clever rhetorical device, or symptom of cultural exhaustion, David LaRocca asks in Metafiction on Screen why artists return so persistently to configurations that stage and disclose their own nature, and why audiences continue to find such revelations so absorbing. He locates metafiction's source in the doubleness inherent to human self-awareness: our capacity not only to think, desire, act, and remember, but to notice ourselves doing so. Moving from cinema's earliest reflexive gestures to modernist metalepsis, experimental and avant-garde moving-image art, postmodern reflexivity, contemporary television, and the efflorescent recursiveness of digital media, Metafiction on Screen traces the meta as both narrative practice and cognitive structure-positing that it becomes available as art because it first names a structure. Considering this uncanny dimension of thought, cinema and television do more than depict experience; they make experience newly available as a problem of form, mediation, and consciousness.

Bringing philosophy into conversation with film criticism, literary theory, media studies, aesthetics, and narratology, Metafiction on Screen alternates productively between close readings and large-scale cultural analysis. LaRocca writes with sustained attention to composition and technique: from the marquee feature to the bingeable serial, from the essay film to the supercut, he remains attuned to the formal and hermeneutic force of an edit, a shot, a physical gesture, a line of dialogue, a frame within a frame, a recurring genre convention, or a serial pattern. From these concrete details emerge broader reflections on memory, embodiment, mortality, spectatorship, adaptation, and repetition.

LaRocca's philosophical curiosity propels him to examine a wide range of cinematic and televisual instances, drawing on Stanley Cavell's alertness to our ordinary engagements with media and Garrett Stewart's micro-discriminations of style and texture. Extended considerations of works by Chaplin, Keaton, Vertov, Welles, Fellini, Godard, Varda, Haneke, Herzog, Wenders, David Lynch, Charlie Kaufman, Quentin Tarantino, Noah Baumbach, the Coen brothers, Olivier Assayas, and others reveal how films and series compel audiences to ask what it means for an image, a genre, or a medium to turn back upon its own conditions of presentation.

At once erudite and accessible, theoretically ambitious yet grounded in fine-grained analysis of particular films, episodes, and sequences, LaRocca offers an account of how the meta-discernible from the earliest days of screened media-has persisted to become one of the defining creative logics of twenty-first-century culture: a mode of play, critique, and homage, in which repetition is imbricated with invention, and creativity with corporate strategy. In an age of proliferating screens and recursive forms, Metafiction on Screen shows how cinema and television transform representation into reflection, returning viewers to the aesthetic, technological, and historical pressures from which screen worlds are made.