Nevertheless, literary journalists, usually, omit the explicit projection of the authorial subjectivity through the use of fictional point of view to ensure a sense of historical objectivity. They overcome the borderlines between public events and their intersubjective experiences by approaching “public fact through a frank, obtrusive, liberated assertion of their private consciousness” (Hellmann, “Postmodern Journalism” 52). In other words, literary journalists indulge themselves in an intersubjective experience of narrating public historical facts from an individual perspective that problematizes the dichotomy between the public and private, between the historical and the personal, and consequently between the journalistic and the literary. The autobiographical trope can be traced in The Armies as the narrative opens a window of intersection between a highly intersubjective experience and reporting a historical event. Through the formal division of the book into two parts, Mailer seeks to establish an inquiry about the status of genres traditionally polarized as fiction and history, literature and journalism, novel and history.
ABSTRACT This article focuses how Amitav Ghosh uses history against fiction and how he represents reality against fiction. In the nineteenth century, literature and history were considered branches of the same tree of learning, a tree which sought to interpret experience for the purpose of guiding and elevating man. Then came the separation that resulted in the distinct disciplines of literary and historical studies today, despite the fact that the realist novel shared many similar beliefs about the possibility of writing factually about observable reality. Fiction about history is called historiographic metafiction. This article eplains how Amitav Ghosh uses history with in fiction in the novel The Hungry Tide.
These binaries include history and literature, fact and fiction, and reality and imagination to mention just a few. According to them there shouldn’t be a distinction between these notions, rather they should be put together and presented as a whole to create a unified picture and a better understanding of, for example, history. Aside from these binaries, postmodernists have questioned two important notions that were set by the enlightenment thinkers and that are closely related to our understanding of the relationship between history on the one hand and fiction on the other as presented by Don DeLillo. These notions are ‘positivist history’ and ‘the universal subject’. Positivist history is the
While this conclusion is intriguing, it seems as though it could be another article in its own right, and it lessens the strength of the thesis. American detective fiction is no longer the mirror being discussed, and instead, it is a backdrop. The purpose of the article is to prove American detective fiction’s worth, as well as how and why it should be analyzed; the claim is that taking the genre seriously and studying it reveals cultural and societal views of the eras to which each work belongs. If proving the qualities of American detective fiction is the focus, then the spy fiction tangent is a side note at
The Kite Runner is a book written as fiction yet possibly read as reality; some readers might even question the veracity of the events narrated throughout the story before realizing its categorization as a novel. This comes exclusively due to the story’s evident partial factual basis, even when said facts only reside in the Afghan and American history cited in the book. But how different can readers truly interpret the text? Knowledge of the novel’s internal and external context can help a reader understand more about the book, and hence possibly even find new hidden meaning in passages that were before just fiction; however, the writer’s understanding of his readers might also help him guide said audience towards a specific message. Is the book more than it seeks to feign?
His writing ranges from lyrical aurete to forthright. Junger incorporates the Frame Story literary device with the intention of organizing several similar stories and revealing the connections at the end. Junger also uses flashback to reveal background, foreshadowing to provide suspense where it’s lacking and convey information that gives readers that “Ah ha!” feeling later in the text after all is revealed, and personification to add life. Junger cannot be entirely sure of the final moments of Andrea Gail and her crew and tries his best to speculate and draw reasonable conclusions without assumption. With this obstacle in mind, Junger writes this story not about the Romantic action of man against a terrible force of nature but about the lives taken by the storm and the lives that loss has affected.
Egan explains that there are different types of narration within the text that all serve their own purposes and make the Zuo zhuan unique to other texts and historically valuable. While Confucius and other contributors to the Chunqiu are more forward in their narration of their own values and moral standings, the narrator of the Zuo zhuan takes a much more furtive approach, where he attempts to utilize the characters within the story to accurately express history and his opinions. This brings us to his first narrative technique, which Egan describes as “silence of the narrator” where “as the author removes himself from overt control and interpretation of his material, his covert manipulation must increase.” The Zuo zhuan includes numerous scenes of battles and historically notable conversations between war figureheads, which are included because of their significance and the lessons to be learned from them. However, the author of the Zuo zhuan only offers simple introductions and essential background information before describing historical events. The lessons and values of these events lie within the dialogue, speeches, and events themselves, as “it is rare that the cause or significance of an event is specifically identified.” Therefore, only provided with necessary historical data, it is up to the reader to come to conclusions about the significance of the material in the Zuo zhuan, which is arguably more meaningful than being directly explained or told what to gather from reading, like in the Chunqiu
But on the other side there still remains the basic fact that without quantitative confirmation, statements on style lack the support of concrete evidence. Statistical analysis, therefore, becomes an essential and important tool in stylistic description. Style therefore consists of the choices that the writer makes from the repertoire of language; it basically falls in the domain of language use; for instance what choices are made by a particular writer in a particular text. In literature it is possible to distinguish between what the writer chooses to talk about and how he chooses to talk about it. The literary communication in literature is done through carefully selected diction.
He uses that understanding to develop on the basic personality of McCandless, throughout the entire book, that Krakauer first established.Krakauer also uses passages from famous authors or philosophers to complement the thoughts and actions of McCandless; this gives the reasoning of McCandless more legitimacy and compels the reader to not discount what McCandless is thinking so easily. In order to understand McCandless, Krakauer had to show what McCandless was like while in society, and what seemingly pushed him out. McCandless does not embody the typical characteristics of a runaway which could make it
Thus, the use of first person pronouns and emotional language should be avoided, to a certain extent. Some of the reasons can be classified as the identity of writer, the terminology and the point of view in writing. The most important reason is the identity of the writer. Apprentice scholars need to understand their own identities as a writer and a member of their discourse community. First person pronouns generally present personal opinion, instead of facts or scientific information.