Od fikce fakticity k fakticitě fikce
From the Fictions of Facticity to the Facticity of Fictions

Summary/Abstract: This theoretical paper is based on Hayden White’s ideas contained in his essay The Fictions of Factual Representation and tries to apply them onto the journalistic texts. The starting point is to dismiss the illusion that it is possible to neutrally describe “facts” before their interpretation. Such rejection results from the rhetorical aspect, namely the knowledge that linguistic modes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) prefigure a certain way of explanation. Journalistic texts are mostly based on the mode of metonymy, which implicates a simple description of causality and relations but does not include qualitative aspect of such issue (especially emotions), as the mode of synecdoche does. Journalistic texts therefore cannot capture “reality” in its complexity. In conclusion, this paper proposes to solve such journalistic insufficiency by retrieval of the (pre-positivistic) news genre, which would include imaginary elements of narration (and so would combine the metonymy and synecdoche mode).

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