Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Adaptation, Metafiction, Self-Creation, Julie Levinson

Julie Levinson

When the film Adaptation was released, the critical reception generally lauded it for the originality of its narrative construction and criticized it for its disappointingly conventional ending. “Adaptation, Metafiction, Self-Creation,” refutes those critical assessments by placing the film in historical and theoretical contexts. The film conforms to a type of reflexive storytelling that I call “self-creating narrative”: works that document, as part of their diegesis, their own artistic coming-into-being. Using the narratological taxonomy of Gerard Genette, the article examines Adaptation side by side with such earlier exemplars of the form as 8 1/2 and Providence, which likewise engage in metafictive …