Critics such as Waugh claim that, by calling the reader's attention to novelistic frames, metafiction "lays bare the conventions of realism" and is a way of "tracing the outline of the frame through which one we look at [fiction]” (18, 27). To be sure, metafiction uses the literary devices of parody and irony to allow the reader to recognize and criticize literary or social conventions. However, just as non-metafictional texts naturalize the frames and literary conventions they employ, some critics have noted that metafiction also “creates a new illusion, even as it purports to denounce the one on which the 'traditional realistic' novel is based” ( Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative 45). This illusion presupposes that in a metafictional text, “frame” and “frame-break” (Waugh 142), or convention and convention-breaking, are clearly delineated. This would imply that metafiction becomes an almost transparent medium through which we can examine conventions and fiction. However, this argument is not convincing since metafictional texts are ultimately still composed of language and have their own conventions such as self-reflexivity and parody, which may or may not be commented on in these texts. To expose the structures of metanarrative, it is clear that a “metalanguage” is needed, a “language that functions as a signifier” (Waugh 4) of the language of metanarrative. This is what I call meta-metafiction. Most commentators have stopped short of identifying meta-metafiction as a mode of writing distinct from metafiction. The illusion of metafictional transparency, combined with the anxiety that recursion in fiction would lead to an “uncontrolled” proliferation of images without an “external frame” to prevent the text from “[breaking] rando… in the middle of paper ......r are self-reflexive of themselves as particular fictional texts and analyze the movement between different frames of reference facilitated by parody and irony. Next, I will discuss their self-reflexivity in relation to narrative in general, and analyze the ways in which they facilitate and represent the production of textual meaning. Finally, I will explore how these texts are self-reflexive of their existence as systems within the linguistic system, and why they are not infinitely regressive despite their increasingly “meta” level of commentary. To conclude, I will address the tension between the potential and limitations of all fictions and “meta” texts that belong to the language system. To be sure, my article is also subject to these same limitations, but in the absence of a better way to communicate these ideas, these words will have to suffice.