Ways in which Cervantes is metafiction

 1. The work is a parody, so it is automatically metafiction, because of intertextuality.  

2. Breaking the theatrical fourth wall, in DQ's reaction to Maese Pedro's puppet show. 

3. In the second part, commentaries on the 1st part, and critique of the apocryphal Quijote. The printing press in Barcelona. 

4. Discussions of the merits of various literary works. The burning of books at the end of the work. 

5. Interpolated novels. 

6. The found manuscript and translation tropes.  

There are probably other things too, depending on how one wants to slice the pie and define these terms.  

IRISE

 We have had a rebranding.  The acronym is IRISE and each letter represents a value: integrity, respect, innovation, stewardship, excellence. It's hard not to see this language as being kind of empty.  The words are great ones to which we should aspire, but making a list doesn't help the administration negotiate better with our faculty union. It doesn't raise our salaries or our morale. Of course, each word has its own bullet points. For example, under excellence we find this inspiring but somehow uninspiring language that might have been generated by AI:   

• "We are all leaders who engage in, advocate for, and support learning and the advancement of knowledge, skills, and society." 

Riffaterre's joke

I heard a talk by Riffattere, He said this joke was not ambiguous, because the only funny way is to read it is one way, not the other. 

"Bob makes love to his wife every Thursday. So does Bill."   

I was thinking of a variation of this. A man complain to his boss about being depressed. The boss says, when I get depressed, I take the afternoon off, go and have a martini with my wife, and take her to bed. Why don't you try it? I'll give you afternoon off. 

"How did it go?" asks the boss the next day.  Wonderful! says the man. By the way, you have a nice house.  

A joke

 What do you feel about the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning?  

I'm not intuit.  

Machado

 Cuatro cosas tiene el hombre

que no sirven en la mar:
ancla, gobernalle y remos,
y miedo de naufragar.

Modification

 Invited to Spain in November by André Soria Olmedo to talk about Lorca and flamenco.  So I'm starting my paper now. I realize that I need to be writing toward something in order to write. This is the first time in a while I really really like working. 

Anyway, my idea has been that flamenco and poetry of the canon (like Lorca)  are involved in increasing each other's prestige, reciprocally.  Today I came up with a kind of twist on this: for this to work, the musical setting must appear "natural" in some way (unforced). This means that the listener has to feel a connection between the music and the words, and that the cultural worlds of the original poem and the musical setting cannot be too distant (or be perceived as too distant.) 

Ally McBeal

 I saw an episode of "Ally McBeal" and heard one character remark to the other about how they have had a lot of sexual harassment cases lately. And of course, since the entire premise of the show is to sexualize office politics in a titillating way, the reference becomes "meta." You want to say to the characters: it is the writers' fault!  

The premise of "Murder she wrote" is that the main character will solve a murder that occurs in her vicinity, every week.  This means that the murder rate in her small Maine town is going to be far worse than any big city.  At one point, in an episode that doesn't take place in Cabot Cove, a character remarks about how many murders occur when she is around.  Clearly, once you see Jessica Fletcher, you should get as far away from there as possible! 

My third example is Snoopy's dog house. Why does he sleep on top of the doghouse, rather than inside of it?  He gets rained on or snowed on, but doesn't enter the house itself.  The reason is that we need to see him. Visually, the strip does not work if Snoopy is inside the dog house. So jokes about him getting snowed on and never escaping into his house, are also references to the conventional visual language of the strip itself.   

I guess what I'm trying to get at here, is that a fictional universe will have its own rules, ones established by generic conventions rather than by the way things work in our, non-fictional universe.  I think that's what gets Don Quixote in trouble as well.