Literary Journalistic Trope

Writing Out of the Box: Literary Journalistic Tropes in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night

1. Introduction

In the 1960s, literary journalism emerged as a new hybrid genre that combines the best practices of both fact and fiction, or journalism and literature. The emerging genre is marked by the publication of two non-fictional books written by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer; namely In Cold Blood (1965) and The Armies of the Night (1968) respectively. At the same year of its publication, Mailer’s The Armies has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Since then, it has been the focus of critical investigation as a major work of American nonfiction. Literary journalism has various labels that are used interchangeably. Leonira Flis

To show the manifestation of the theory of literary journalism in practice, Mailer’s text, The Armies of the Night, is analyzed. The purpose of analyzing Mailer’s text is to show how the emerging genre effectively creates a third space in-between the well- established genres of fiction and non-fiction. This paper proposes three tropes of literary journalism: the intertextual, the self-reflexive, and the autobiographical. On proposing these tropes of literary journalism, this paper mainly attempts to connect the critical discussion to Mailer’s Armies with its explicit and implicit reflection on the

They use the act of journalism as a trope to explore the modern reality that is “so extraordinary, horrific, and absurd that the methods of conventional realistic imitation are no longer adequate. There is no point in carefully creating fiction that gives an illusion of life when life itself seems illusory” (Lodge 33). Literary journalists do not adopt the escapist formula with its tendency for a retreat from the world of reality. Rather, they attempt to delve into reality and to explore the world as if it was art. They not only construct but also attempt to understand reality out of the fragmented ambiguity of journalistic facts. In brief, literary journalism, through the use of literary techniques, attempts to break with the singularity of historical narrative in favor of a far more complicated reality. Literary journalists strive to uncover the more universal and artistic truths about the world in which we