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Intertextualization In The Armies

Decent Essays

Literary journalistic discourse is “perhaps the most intertextual of all texts, referring to other texts” in terms of transforming prior historical stories and restructuring conventional literary and journalistic genres and discourses in an attempt to generate a new one, that is, literary journalism (Mills, Discourse 65-66). Thus, the journalistic discourse cannot be but dialogic and intertextual because its raw material is a news story that can be manipulated, adapted, and adopted by the literary journalist in order to compete other versions of the story. It “assimilates a variety of discourses” that “always to some extent question and relativize each other’s authority” (Waugh 6). Literary journalists, thus, are actively engaged in interpreting and scrutinizing the discursive practices of intertextuality in order to generate their distinctive but hybrid discourse. This hybrid discourse can be …show more content…

By looking at a literary journalistic text contrapuntally, intertwined histories and perspectives will be taken into account. Such a contrapuntal analysis, developed by Edward Said, can be used in interpreting and exploring literary journalistic texts, considering the perspectives of both the journalist or historian and the fabulist or the man of letters. This approach is not only helpful but also necessary in making important connections in a non-fiction novel. The contrapuntal discourse, according to Said, shows an "awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts" (Said 51). It takes in various accounts of socio-political issues by tackling simultaneously the factual historical perspective of journalism and the literary fabulations of

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