Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of self-referential books

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Courcelles 01:56, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

List of self-referential books[edit]

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Woefully incomplete, redlinky. About half of them are by redlinked authors. No sources, no inbound links, only 15 edits in nearly 6 years of existence. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ^{(Otters want attention)} 02:26, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Interesting concept, but no secondary sources are provided to show that the topic itself has been noted or that any of the books listed are examples of it. Kitfoxxe (talk) 02:47, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, incoherent and ambiguous title and concept. There simply isn't a fourth wall to break in books like there is in stage, TV, or movies (such as It's Garry Shandling's Show or Moonlighting (TV series)), perhaps because there's no possibility of illusion in the first place that you're doing anything other than reading a story, regardless of whether it's fact or fiction.
Some of the books listed are works of fiction, the title of which references a fictional book within the fictional story (such as The Neverending Story). Other books are nonfiction books with titles that merely happen to reference the fact that it's a book (Steal This Book). Apart from those being two very different things, one would ultimately have to include all books with the words "history", "chronicles", "diary", or "memoirs" in the title if that is enough to satisfy inclusion.
And even if limited to self-referential content, it's extremely common for a nonfiction author to comment within the book on why he wrote the book, how he researched it, etc. It's also extremely common for autobiographers to directly address a reader or otherwise acknowledge that what they are writing will be read, or for a fictional narrator to do so as well. So it simply isn't meaningful to call a book "self-referential", at least not without some kind of sourced limiting concept to focus and demonstrate its validity. It might be possible for a book like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which Kundera narrates a fictional story in his own voice as an author, and in telling the story also explains his conception of the characters and his philosophical ideas underpinning the story rather than staying within the fiction (something its article does not yet note). But I don't know if there's a simple term or classification for that kind of literary device, and it would be in any event a completely different list. postdlf (talk) 04:00, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Moby Dick and Les Misérables came to my mind.Kitfoxxe (talk) 04:08, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Haven't read those yet (alas, the state of American education...) so I don't know how their structure/literary devices might relate. But I finally figured out what I was getting at with Unbearable Lightness of Being: metafiction. See List of metafictional works, which may itself be subject to criticism but it's much better defined and focused than this list. Maybe this list should just redirect there. postdlf (talk) 19:47, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Both of them have loads of great non-fiction material in with the story. In Moby Dick it's hard to tell if it's the author or the main character talking to us. Kitfoxxe (talk) 01:34, 27 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. — —Tom Morris (talk) 13:51, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Literature-related deletion discussions. — —Tom Morris (talk) 13:52, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete: too vague and ambiguous a category. Makes it nearly impossible to verify more than a few entries, and potentially of infinite scope, and infinite arguments about what should / should not belong. Dzlife (talk) 18:25, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, conflates too many separate types of books: things that are really meta, things that are not really self-referential at all and just have "book" in the title, has the potential to include any eighteenth-century book that addresses the reader, etc. Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 20:43, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete when you remove books whose titles are self referential, and any other trivial self referential titles, the rest are unsourced as having such content. I disagree that a book cant break the fourth wall. a novel simply has to include the reader in the narrative, making reference to the fact that the voice speaking is imaginary, and not just a "dear reader" narrative device. If someone can create a list of at least half a dozen novels which explicitly break the fourth wall, then i guess the article can stay, otherwise maybe just create a category (again, if sourced at the main article)Mercurywoodrose (talk) 04:36, 27 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.