Metafiction

"Metafictionists may have had aesthetic theories out the bazoo, but they were also sentient citizens of a community that was exchanging an old idea of itself as a nation of do-ers and be-ers for a new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of self-concious watchers and appearers. For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single order expansion of it's own great theoretical nemesis, Realism."
-David Foster Wallace