This article seeks to highlight certain areas of critical failure to provide space to the post-postmodern and the need to understand the radical impulses of fiction outside of the theories of Jameson and Hutcheon. I contest both Jameson’s theory of ‘waning of affect’ and Hutcheon’s theory of narcissistic metafictionality. I further discuss language theories to better understand the idiom of the postmodern as different from the language of preceding genres of fiction. Moreover, the essay also discusses metafictionality as a corollary to the postmodern condition, and not its defining character and argues that new postmodern fiction is inscribed with an embedded meta-analysis of its own metafictionality that cannot be simply contained by the reductive logic of metafiction. I also take the Kantian category of the parergon and interpret its usages, in the Derridian sense, in postmodern fiction as a technique to both defamiliarize the reader and to add to the ‘affect’ of the text, its reception and depth. I also look at the use of paratextuality and autotextuality (a category I derive from blocks of auto-text saved in computers) to negotiate the relationship between varying sets of signifiers and their present (or absent) signifieds.