Reflexivity in Filmic and Literary Fiction: Marc Forster’s Stranger than Fiction and Robert Grudin’s Book
Reflexivity in Filmic and Literary Fiction: Marc Forster’s Stranger than Fiction and Robert Grudin’s Book

Summary/Abstract: The virtues of self-reflexivity in fictional texts have become something of a critical orthodoxy: texts doing (or purporting to do) away with the transparency of their own medium have been hailed as ‘new,’ ‘original,’ ‘revolutionary,’ politically ‘progressive,’ fostering ‘active’ readings, etc. – in short, everything that sounds critically correct. This complacent view has been challenged of late from a variety of vantage points, notably film studies and literary criticism. This essay engages with two self-reflexive texts, one literary and one filmic, in an attempt to illustrate the reductiveness of certain still prevalent critical truisms. The choice of Stranger than Fiction and Book: A Novel, the former not a filmic adaptation of the latter, has been made with a view to eschewing the pitfalls of ‘fidelity criticism,’ another quondam critical commonplace. Nevertheless, envisioning what their respective counterparts in the other medium could possibly look like will prove to be a productive imaginative exercise.

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