Storytelling and Truthtelling
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
STORYTELLING AND TRUTHTELLING: DISCURSIVE PRACTICES OF NEWS-STORYTELLING IN TRUMAN CAPOTE, NORMAN MAILER, AND JOHN HERSEY A Dissertation by JUNGSIK PARK Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2006 Major Subject: English STORYTELLING AND TRUTHTELLING: DISCURSIVE PRACTICES OF NEWS-STORYTELLING IN TRUMAN CAPOTE, NORMAN MAILER, AND JOHN HERSEY A Dissertation by JUNGSIK PARK Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved by: Chair of Committee, David McWhirter Committee Members, Katherine Kelly Jimmie Killingsworth James Aune Head of Department, Paul Parrish May 2006 Major Subject: English iii ABSTRACT Storytelling and Truthtelling: Discursive Practices of News-storytelling in Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and John Hersey. (May 2006) Jungsik Park, B.A., Sogang University; M.A., Queens College, The City University of New York Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. David McWhirter Focusing on new-journalistic nonfiction novels by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and John Hersey, this dissertation conceptualizes the discursive practices of news-storytelling as a necessary matrix of storytelling and truthtelling activities. Despite the dominant postmodern emphasis on storytelling over truthtelling in such disciplines as literature, historiography, journalism, and legal studies, storytelling-in-the-discipline is also constrained by a set of assumptions and practices about what constitutes professional storytelling. Since news-stories report on events in a public arena where numerous competing stories abound, they are highly aware of other neighboring stories and so relate, compete, and negotiate with other stories to make their stories not merely repetitive but argumentative and re-tellable. As a socially regulated and conditioned discourse, news-storytelling in its enterprise is predicated iv upon different sets of discursive authorities, material conditions, and audience expectations, where various facts and interpretations are argued, tested, and judged. Chapter I briefly surveys the ways in which news-stories’ claim to referentiality is problematized and even stigmatized by the postmodern ethos of storytelling. Chapter II then explores the discursive dynamics of news- stories, which arise from the paradoxical status of being simultaneously news and a story. Particularly, this chapter highlights the discursive practice of “source marking” and “counter-storytelling” through which news-storytellers foreground their reliability as able researchers, analysts, and contenders. Chapter III discusses the issue of (inter-) textuality in the vectors of storyteller and the world, and examines how news-storytellers draw on, blend into, and counter competing and neighboring stories to situate their own stories in the web of intertextuality and to reinforce the competency, honesty, and quality of their news-stories. Chapter IV is a historical examination of a “transcript” mode, a particular discursive practice of news-storytellers, through which they try to uphold the empirical status of their news-stories. Chapter V concludes the dissertation by arguing that news-stories provide a clarifying vantage point from which to understand the transactions of historical discourse, where news- storytelling replaces (story) knowledge with argument, poetics with rhetoric, and a story with a discourse. v To Yongsoon Yim vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My name alone is attached to this small achievement, but there have been many others who manned the helm, kept the engine running, and maintained a close watch on the progress of my journey down the dissertation path. I would like to thank Dr. David McWhirter, Dr. Katherine Kelly, Dr. Jimmie Killlingsworth, and Dr. James Aune for their professional and emotional guidance as I worked on my dissertation. I feel so grateful to the administration, staff, friends, and faculty of the Department of English, in particular, Mr. Obed Sanchez, Dr. Marco Portales, Dr. Margaret Ezell, and Dr. Larry Mitchell, who genuinely offered me invaluable advice on parts or the whole of the dissertation. I also extend my gratitude to An Sonjae Sonsengnim, who initiated me to the world of literature, life, and love, and without whose help I couldn’t have started this long journey. Thank you to Dr. David Richter, who sparked my interest in the world of stories and storytelling. A big thank you to Dr. David McWhirter, who, besides his ingenious input and insightful suggestions, reassured me with a steady, positive outlook, when I struggled to see a way out of a dark and muddled path, and who guided and accompanied me down to the Ph.D. shore. vii Thanks to everyone who stayed with me for this long haul. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT.............................................................................................................. iii DEDICATION......................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................... v TABLE OF CONTENTS......................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: POSTMODERNISM AND THE “OTHER” LITERATURE..................................................................................... 1 II STORYTELLING AND TRUTHTELLING: THE NARRATIVE ETHICS OF NEWS-STORYTELLING ............................................ 11 1. Postmodern Turn in Storytelling ....................................... 11 2. Poetics and Ethics of News-Storytelling ........................... 17 3. Source Marking..................................................................... 23 4. Counter-Storytelling ............................................................ 32 5. News-Storytelling Act ......................................................... 46 III STORYTELLING AND RETELLING: INTERTEXTUALITY AND STORY RE-ENACTMENT IN MULTI-GENRE TEXTS..... 60 1. The Doctrine of Panfictionality........................................... 60 2. The Categories of the Text: Narrative, Description, Commentary, and Speech ................................................... 69 3. Textual Forms as Cognitive and Interpersonal Activities ................................................................................ 85 4. Intertextuality........................................................................ 111 5. The Textuality of News-Stories .......................................... 121 ix CHAPTER Page IV TRANSCRIBING REALITY: A CASE HISTORY OF THE “TRANSCRIPT MODE”................................................................... 132 1. The Diachronization of the Text......................................... 132 2. The Conception and Re-emergence of the “Transcript Mode” in the News-Stories of Daniel Defoe and the Later News-Storytellers....................................................... 141 3. The Transcript Mode: Its Constituents and Practices ..... 161 V CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A RHETORIC OF NEWS- STORYTELLING ............................................................................... 179 WORKS CITED....................................................................................................... 184 VITA ......................................................................................................................... 202 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: POSTMODERNISM AND THE “OTHER” LITERATURE “New Journalistic” stories, grouped under the umbrella term of literary nonfiction, have occupied an uneasy space at the obscure corner of narrative studies—a theoretical dead horse in the literary market, branded with the “referential fallacy.” Literary critics have often stigmatized these “new journalistic” stories as too “non-imaginative” and “uncreative” to be considered art, while journalists accused them of being too “subjective” and “biased” to be factual reportage. Under the dubious or even contradictory title, “literary nonfiction,” such narratives have been disowned and attacked by their own generic parents—literature and journalism. While these nonfictional stories have flourished in popular culture particularly since the sixties in the form of autobiography, biography, and memoir, in academia they have neither enjoyed the status of art in the lighted area of creativity and imagination, nor attained the status of factuality and truthfulness as reportage. The double charges against literary nonfiction from __________ This dissertation follows the style of PMLA. 2 both professions are the reflection of flipsides of the same issue: the genre’s problematic claim to referential correspondence and factuality. Despite the recent upsurge of scholarly attention to narrative, nonfiction has been neglected by structuralist narratologists and resisted by poststructuralist critics as an object of theoretical and methodological elaboration. Some structuralist narratologists such as Gerard Prince and Mieke Bal do not particularly differentiate fiction and nonfiction texts as long as they have narrative structures, while others such as Gerard Genette and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan explicitly confine their study to fiction. On the other hand, postmodern (pan-)textualists have problematized the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. In Tropics of Discourse, Hayden White argues that when “[v]iewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are