Haas-Haus, containing shops, offices, restaurants, an interior piazza, etc., stands across from a medieval cathedral. Haas-Haus mediates between the different styles of the adjacent buildings (Gothic, Baroque, turn of the century, and 1950s modern). It transforms the pale green building to its left into a stepped square motif, then into a modern curtain wall, then into a curved cylinder that recalls an ancient fortification that once stood on the site. It is a postmodern chameleon building, a 'symbiosis' of past, present and future. Sissel Lie's text accomplishes a similar feat.
Haas-Haus, Vienna, Austria
| Historiographic metafiction creates a double awareness of texts' fictionality and basis in real events. |
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The self-conscious juxtaposition of two women, one from the Renaissance and the other from the late 20th century, gives the reader a hightened awareness of the historical material's simultaneous fictionality and its basis in historical "fact". Historians (or narrators) can frame and tell about select people or events however they choose, and exclude what they choose. Historiographic metafiction does not 'aspire to tell the truth' as much as question: Historiographic metafiction often allows the reader to see historical materials being collected and the attempts to create narrative order. Other common techniques include: |
Holton, Robert Jarring Witnesses : Modern Fiction and the Representation of History.
Hutcheon, Linda The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction.
Onega, Susan (ed.) Telling Histories: Narrativizing History, Historicizing Literature..
White, Hayden The Content of the Form : Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation.