Interrelated Trope Of Literary Journalism Analysis

Summing up, literary journalism is an intertextual act that binds fictional and factional activities into a deliberate reality statement towards, and about, the world we live in. By formulating a specific kind of narrative to capture his/her understanding of the world, the literary journalist implicates a specific epistemological and ethical world—the world we would feel happy or sad about, the world with which we may sympathize or condemn, and the world we may find justified or absurd. It is a contrapuntal narrative act, through which the literary journalist argues for a specific kind of story world.

3.2.The Second Trope: The Narcissistic

The second interrelated trope of literary journalism is its tendency towards narcissism. Literary journalistic

According to Linda Hutcheon, metafiction abuses the fixed notions and conventions of both realism and modernism by turning to itself and to history. Such a narrative is “contextual and self-reflexive, ever aware of its status as discourse, as a human construct” (A Poetics 53). A major feature of metafiction is its critical and renewing reflection of its own devices and practices. It aims “simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction,” and this practice brings the traditionally distinct modes of literary creation and criticism together (Waugh 6). It functions implicitly or explicitly as a theory of fiction, usually in a self-conscious way. Therefore, it “enacts or performs what it wishes to say about narrative while itself being a narrative” (Currie

Like metafiction, meta-nonfiction is constructed upon allusions to other texts; and, what is more, it has its links to the actual world and its documents. A literary journalistic text is self-reflexive or “meta-factual” (Zavarzadeh 123), or “meta-nonfiction” (Lehman 179). Thus, a meta-factual or meta-nonfictional literary journalistic text tells the story of its own becoming. So, “[t]he underlying drama becomes the story of the writing of the text” (Anderson, Style as Argument 35). It refer both to its own textuality and to the actual world outside it.

Mailer designs The Armies of the Night, in two parts suggesting that the novelistic first part of the book is a necessary prelude to the historical second part (Weber 19). Both personal and textual narcissism