Storytelling and truthtelling: discursive practices of news-storytelling in Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and John Hersey

摘要

Focusing on new-journalistic nonfiction novels by Truman Capote,Norman Mailer, and John Hersey, this dissertation conceptualizes thediscursive practices of news-storytelling as a necessary matrix of storytellingand truthtelling activities. Despite the dominant postmodern emphasis onstorytelling over truthtelling in such disciplines as literature, historiography,journalism, and legal studies, storytelling-in-the-discipline is also constrainedby a set of assumptions and practices about what constitutes professionalstorytelling.Since news-stories report on events in a public arena where numerouscompeting stories abound, they are highly aware of other neighboring storiesand so relate, compete, and negotiate with other stories to make their storiesnot merely repetitive but argumentative and re-tellable. As a socially regulatedand conditioned discourse, news-storytelling in its enterprise is predicated upon different sets of discursive authorities, material conditions, and audienceexpectations, where various facts and interpretations are argued, tested, andjudged.Chapter I briefly surveys the ways in which news-stories?? claim toreferentiality is problematized and even stigmatized by the postmodern ethosof storytelling. Chapter II then explores the discursive dynamics of newsstories,which arise from the paradoxical status of being simultaneously newsand a story. Particularly, this chapter highlights the discursive practice of??source marking?? and ??counter-storytelling?? through which news-storytellersforeground their reliability as able researchers, analysts, and contenders.Chapter III discusses the issue of (inter-) textuality in the vectors of storytellerand the world, and examines how news-storytellers draw on, blend into, andcounter competing and neighboring stories to situate their own stories in theweb of intertextuality and to reinforce the competency, honesty, and quality oftheir news-stories. Chapter IV is a historical examination of a ??transcript??mode, a particular discursive practice of news-storytellers, through which theytry to uphold the empirical status of their news-stories. Chapter V concludesthe dissertation by arguing that news-stories provide a clarifying vantage pointfrom which to understand the transactions of historical discourse, where newsstorytellingreplaces (story) knowledge with argument, poetics with rhetoric,and a story with a discourse.