I'm curious - would you consider Innocence Standing By (http://www.livejournal.com/users/nostrademons/26104.html) (my one attempt at serious smut) to be a metafic? It kinda fits under both definitions...
Anyway, I think my definition of metafic falls more under the "explicit" heading. My only prior exposure to the term "meta" comes from computer science, where it indicates taking things to a new level and using a system to describe itself. Thus a metaobject is an object that describes objects, metadata is data about the data, a tag is a tag about the following tags, a metacircular interpreter is an interpreter written in the language it's interpreting.
By analogy, then, a metafic is a fic about itself - a self referencing fic, if you will. Alternatively, you could broaden that to a fic about the act of writing or reading fiction, but I find the narrower definition to be more informative. As my English prof was fond of pointing out, every story is both a metaphor for the act of reading and for the time period in which it was created. Because literary interpretation is so vague and so subjective, you could make a case for every fic being a metafic.
Of course, some stories just ooze meta. One of my mom's friends wrote a novel called Leash where the narrator starts speaking directly to the reader, and indeed, if you read it, it's hard to imagine it being anything but meta. Some of my fics are like that too - The Last Word (http://www.livejournal.com/users/nostrademons/23438.html) ends with itself being submitted to some website (presumably FA).
BTW, I tend to define literary language in terms of audience perception. That's why I go for an explicit definition of meta - because it's possible to perceive so much within a work, an implicit definition leaves you dangerously close to not saying anything at all. Maybe not the association you were looking for, but there's your data point.
no subject
Anyway, I think my definition of metafic falls more under the "explicit" heading. My only prior exposure to the term "meta" comes from computer science, where it indicates taking things to a new level and using a system to describe itself. Thus a metaobject is an object that describes objects, metadata is data about the data, a tag is a tag about the following tags, a metacircular interpreter is an interpreter written in the language it's interpreting.
By analogy, then, a metafic is a fic about itself - a self referencing fic, if you will. Alternatively, you could broaden that to a fic about the act of writing or reading fiction, but I find the narrower definition to be more informative. As my English prof was fond of pointing out, every story is both a metaphor for the act of reading and for the time period in which it was created. Because literary interpretation is so vague and so subjective, you could make a case for every fic being a metafic.
Of course, some stories just ooze meta. One of my mom's friends wrote a novel called Leash where the narrator starts speaking directly to the reader, and indeed, if you read it, it's hard to imagine it being anything but meta. Some of my fics are like that too - The Last Word (http://www.livejournal.com/users/nostrademons/23438.html) ends with itself being submitted to some website (presumably FA).
BTW, I tend to define literary language in terms of audience perception. That's why I go for an explicit definition of meta - because it's possible to perceive so much within a work, an implicit definition leaves you dangerously close to not saying anything at all. Maybe not the association you were looking for, but there's your data point.