sample RRL

Chapter II

Review of Related Literature

Before the idea of fusing journalism and literature as one writing style became acceptable, studies on texts were divided between literary artistry and newswriting’s objectivity. An example of a literary study is Leonora Fajutagana’s (2000) The Wild Woman Archetype in Contemporary Philippine Novels: The Empowered Filipina in Joaquin, Rosca and Yuson which examines how women were portrayed in literary texts starting from the Philippine Colonial literature to the Contemporary Period. Fajutagana claims that the image of a woman in Philippine literature evolved from a virginal and passive Maria Clara to a liberated and heroic image in the 1970s. Even though a lot of studies have been done about Joaquin’s women characters like in Summer Solstice and in The Woman who had Two Navels, Fajutagana still delves on the same subject but takes a different look at the wildest side of a woman, Nenita Coogan, in Joaquin’s Caves and Shadows (1983) using the psychoanalytic theory of Carl Jung. Fajutagana establishes that nature/ecology and gender are closely related with how “gender power relations are determined by a people’s attitude towards nature” (Reeves as cited in Fajutagana, 2010, p. 271). Women in the pre-colonial societies assumed a bigger role and these societies considered nature as supreme and sacred thus linking the two, nature and women as powerful. Fajutagana concludes that the subjugation and infiltration of foreign influences into the primitive societies gave way to male ascendancy that is ‘antagonistic to nature’.

While a literary study like that of Fajutagana focuses on character portrayal, communication research or journalism, on the other hand, puts more value on the objective approach in conducting the study. For example, Ernie John Carmona and Soo Jin Kim apply the Content Analysis method in knowing the News Treatment of the Three National Dailies towards Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (2004). The researchers employ units of analysis or statements categorized as positive, neutral, negative to determine the news treatment of the three national dailies towards SARS and identify variables like the number of stories published by the said dailies in a month, the size of the story, the location of the fold, page location and appearance of pictures.

But when creative nonfiction writings came out in unprecedented numbers especially in the pages of American dailies and novels, a textual analysis on the new genre followed thereafter. Scholars proposed to distinguish the new genre from fiction if a scholarly study has to be made.

Literary texts, according to Northrop Frye (as cited in Lehtimaki, 2005), have a definite or final direction which can be determined by their relations to the external world and to the text itself. Frye further explains that centrifugal or inward texts are fictional and centripetal or outward texts are nonfictional. This could mean that a text as it develops to a literary form, must detach itself from the external world.

Sims (2009) also differentiates fiction from literary journalism in his article The Problem and the Promise of Literary Journalism by saying that “Fiction creates an imaginary world and seeks emotional truth, but it has no firm requirement for the troubling details of the real world, as does in literary journalism” (p. 9).

Eric Heyne (as cited in Lehtimaki, 2005) affirms that “Literary nonfiction and fiction are fundamentally different, despite their resemblances in structure or technique, and this difference must be recognized by any theory that hopes to do justice to powerful nonfiction narratives” (p.15) .

Mas’ud Zavarzadeh in his Mythopoeic Reality (1976) claims that “news stories function simultaneously [at] self-referential and out-referential levels: they are self-referential because they exercise the aesthetic control associated with works of art and out-referential in remaining externally verifiable” (p.55). This means nonfiction texts combine in-referential and out-referential aspects; the former refers to the creation of a world ‘mapped out within the book’ and the latter points to external facts which are verifiable ‘outside the book’. Zavarzadeh said that “events and people in nonfiction are actual phenomena in the world accessible to ordinary human senses and unlike the contents of fictive novels, exist outside the cover of the books” (p. 226).

Daniel Lehman (1997) in his book Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge supports the theory of Zavarzadeh by saying that the nonfictional relation between the author, text and audience, which all points to referentiality distinguishes the newgenre from fiction. He adds that fiction has “difficulty to gain access to its referent, its object of representation” (p.25).

Lehtimaki (2005), who also grounds his study on nonfiction on Lehman’s idea, draws the lines between fiction and nonfiction:

Nonfiction’s aim to access to its referent is always an obligatory and serious aim, an inherent part of nonfictional representation. This feature of obligation is not in fiction as it always enjoys imaginative freedom from referentiality. Fiction’s references to the world outside the text are not bound to accuracy and that fiction does not refer exclusively to the real world outside the text. p.62

Jungsik Park (2006) illustrates best the idea of referentiality in his doctoral dissertation entitled Storytelling and Truthtelling: Discursive Practices of News-Storytelling in Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and John Hersey, where he applies Zavarzadeh’s idea of out-referentiality in pointing to the external verifiability of the subject of his study. Details in nonfiction are verifiable outside the book while those of fiction are nonexistent outside the text. Park identifies ‘source marking’ as one of out-referential storytelling practices. Source marking refers to “the storyteller’s textual mediation that identifies his source of information and knowledge” (Park, p. 22). Park finds in Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Hersey’s The Algiers Motel Incident a display of an “astoundingly extensive network of sources on which they predicate their stories, and make explicit the material context and retrospective nature of narrative construction” (p.22).

The truth presented in nonfiction relates to “factual accuracy based on scrupulous documentation” (Lehtimaki, 2005, p.57). The proponent of narratology, Genette, (as cited in Lehtimaki, 2005) supports this claim saying that, “Factual narrative has to justify every such explanation by an indication of its source” (p.67).

The idea of nonfiction developed earlier by the mentioned scholars has transpired in a new genre named as creative nonfiction in which journalistic materials are presented in the form of fiction. Lee Gutkind (2005) describes the new genre as a kind of writing that “employs the diligence of a reporter, the shifting voices and viewpoints of a novelist, the refined wordplay of a poet and the analytical modes of the essayist” (p.6).

The National Endowment for the Arts in the US (as cited in Poland, 2009) considers the genre as "factual prose that is also literary, infused with the stylistic devices. It is a fact-based writing that has foremost a fidelity to accuracy, to truthfulness” (para. 3). On the other hand, Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard (2004) in their book Writing Creative Nonfiction, blur the distinction between journalism and literature with their description of creative nonfiction as journalism but literary since the events and characters are factual but the style of writing is a “storytelling of a very high order through the revelation of character and the suspense of plot, the subtle braiding of themes, rhythms and resonance, memory and imaginative research, precise and original language” (p. 21).

The blending of journalistic and literary elements in one genre interests not only writers but also critics and scholars. The rapid development of this genre prompts scholars to do a textual analysis on the works of popular writers from both journalism and literary fields. Textual analysis is an “educated guess at some of the most likely interpretations that might be made of a text” (Mackee, 2003). Stuart Hall (as cited in Curtin, 1995) explains that in textual analysis, “meaning resides in the dialectical process between the text and the reader which takes place in a particular social and historical context” (p.16). This supports the idea of Lehman (1993) that analyzing a text is a social act which implicates the text and the reader into a relationship. The writing and understanding of a text depends on a societal condition under which the writer and readers live (p. 23).

According to Curtin, the reader starts to deconstruct the text and makes categories to identify the event in the text. Next, the reader employs codes to give text meanings and interprets codes to determine their underlying social meanings. The reader then examines the narrative structure or the plot of each story to determine how it contributes to the interpretation of the content. Symbols, metaphors and other contextual clues may be explored to help in the possible interpretation of a text. The reader then “reconstructs the text to determine the dominant or preferred reading of a text” (Curtin, 1995, p.18). Hall (as cited in Curtin, 1995) explains that the reader should “ensure that the dominant meaning is put into language that will win the consent of the audience to the preferred reading and hence be decoded within the hegemonic framework” (p.18).

More importantly, Curtin (1995) notes that the reader should fit the analysis back to its ‘context of production’. Curtin cites Hall saying that this kind of textual analysis “integrates the social meaning to uncover the social framework of reference and use evidence from the text to support the interpretation” (p. 19). Tompkins, (as cited in Curtin, 1995) asserts that “words are the facts of texts” (p. 20).

In her study on Literary Nonfiction in Works by Isabel Allende and Guadalupe Loaeza, Margaret Anne Mckale Morales (2002) compares selected works of two Latin American writers in the way they use factual details and address political and social issues in their respective country. Allende is from Chile and Loaesa from Mexico. Morales screens Allende’s novels La Casa de los Espiritus (1982), The House of the Spirits (1985), De Amor y de Sombra (1984), Of Love and Shadows (1987), and The Infinite Plan (1993) and Loaesa’s seventeen chronicles on varied themes such as classism and racism of the rich and avaricious, the post-revolutionary gente bien, the new Mexican bourgeoisie, the post-1968 well-to-do, the overthrow of the PRI’s dictablanda, the uprising in Chiapas, and the economic crises and corruption in Mexico among others.

Morales uses the ‘nonfictive techniques’ or characteristics of the novels in revealing how Allende’s works are similar to a documentary reportage which is journalistic in nature. Morales also identifies the theme present in each of Loaeza’s chronicle and concludes that chronicle-type of writing or literary journalism in Mexico is characterized by the function it serves: “to expose events to the public so they may demand accountability” (abstract).

In the end, Morales proves that events in Allende’s novels are true and accurate because of the way Allende describes the events vividly and realistically. Morales also finds out that Loaeza, who has spent most of her time in journalism, uses and interpretes the news of the day in Mexico as materials for her chronicles.