Impartiality In Journalism

Through intertextuality, Mailer seeks to distance himself from both the formula of the realistic novel and that of essentially referential “journalistic impartiality”. The two intertexts intertwine historically in an attempt to perpetuate what Barthes called the "referential illusion," that is, the exclusion of the subject for the sake of the object. In other words, both intertexts presuppose the idea of a cohesive world to be discovered under neutral intermediation of an anticipating subject, simply an observer. In opting for an open, fragmentary, and frankly subjective character, Mailer depends on a metafictional strategy, together with parody mockery, and hilarious mood, to mock the Time reporter and the alleged impartiality and reliability

Literary journalistic texts entail a self-reflective mode of writing and reading in an attempt to replace the old author- text relationship with that of text-reader. They subsume the reader into the text. In most of these texts, the journalist/author is involved in the composition as a writer and as a character involved in the events and incidents of the text. Therefore, the readers have a paradoxical role in the narrative construction, for just as they are forced to recognize the artifice of art in what they are reading, they are still compelled to participate as participants in the process of narrative construction. Thus, narcissistic narrative uses metafictional strategies to lay bare the reader’s narcissism and to offer “a critical perspective on the world and its changeability” (Bal 257). Hutcheon labels this kind of writing as narcissistic. Literary journalism has a two-fold functional formula. It is both reflexion and reflection. Reflexion is a text-oriented process whereas reflection is a context-oriented process. In the text-oriented process, a literary journalistic text aims at throwing back “or mirroring itself and other texts as a narrative strategy of subverting and dismantling any explicit relation between the text itself and the world it represents. This sense of the concept draws the attention to “mirror structures (doublings, analogies, frames, mise en abyme)” of the

Meta-nonfiction tends mainly to play with the possibilities of meaning and form, demonstrating an intense self-consciousness in relation to artistic production and the role to be played by the reader who, invited to enter both the literary space and the space evoked by the journalistic narrative, thus participates in its production. The literary journalistic narrative, through the use of narcissistic meta-non-fictional strategies, aims to explore the impossibility of imposing a single meaning or a single interpretation on any news story. In literary journalistic narrative, the narcissistic trope is used in relation to the text itself to refer to its introvert, introspective, and self-conscious nature, not to the author/reporter. In such a narrative, the link between outside world and textuality has been refashioned on the level of the imaginary process of telling history, not in the product, in the storytelling. So, “the story of the writing of the text” becomes the main focus of such a narrative (Anderson, Style as Argument