The narrative in literary journalism

Abstract

Literary journalism offers a way to convey the truth of real-life events and issues in a more engaging and emotionally impactful manner than traditional news reporting. It bridges the gap between storytelling and journalism, appealing to audiences who seek both the depth of factual reporting and the immersive experience of narrative storytelling. Like any other type of journalism, it has its own features, to which belong immersion, text specific structure, accuracy in presenting content, voice or personal perspective. The purpose of the study is to consider one of storytelling’s techniques, narrative, which covers the plot of the story, its characters, setting, topics and the author’s point of view. The research is based on the analysis of the essays, opinions and reportages as typical examples of narratives in literary journalism. Contextual analysis of political narrative and social-psychological narrative, which are often found in analytical or rational journalism, aims at extracting information of social, political, historical, and culture-specific character. Stylistic analysis of the considered texts gave us possibility to visualize the examples of emotively charged words and stylistic devices. Qualitative content analysis shows that most vividly narrative communication is seen in such journalistic messages, as an essay, opinion, and reportage. Each narrative has a purpose, which dictates the narrative techniques.