Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The novel Elizabeth Costello, by the writer J. M. Coetzee contains the chapter “At the Gate,” in which there is the description of Costello’s judgement and the moment she has to face judges. They ask her about her beliefs, and require her to write her declaration. Costello keeps her position that a writer must not have beliefs. She is in front of the gate and wants to cross it. This paper aims to analyse the reflections on the role of a writer and the literary creation through this fictional essay. For this, the concept of metafiction is used. The overview of the metafiction concept, brought by Faria (2012), allows a better understanding of it, although Scholes, Waugh and Hutcheon approach the concept with different focuses, all considering, especially, that “metafiction is fiction about fiction.” Waugh reinforces the influence of the contemporary context on literary productions, and the metafictional resource would be a reflection of this condition. When criticizing, dialoguing, and discussing textual construction methods in fictional narratives, it explores “the fictionality of the world outside the literary text.” In referring to themselves, according to Hutcheon, there is a continuous mirroring of human actions. So, there is an example of the “return of the author,” in which the creation process (even fictional) fulfills centrality in the text.