Rhetoric of Fact, Fiction, and Faction: Inter-Discursive Dynamic in In Cold Blood

Abstract

Jungsik ParkWith the strategic focus on the textual and language-mediated nature of stories, postmodernist critics have long problematized the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, and preferred to highlight the process of linguistic construction and fictionalization in faction-writing. This trendy critical practice, however, has ignored and impoverished the rhetorical dimension of faction-writing, where reporter-writers strive to negotiate their experienced reality for story representation. To clarify what a faction-writer does with text, this paper explicates the story-making process of faction with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and argues that faction should be understood as a specific type of discursive act rather than being lumped together under the category of fiction. This paper attempts to articulate the modes of dialogue and negotiation between journalistic discourse and novelistic discourse, and characterizes faction-writing as a professionally constructed practice. By defining faction as a particular type of storytelling, the paper relocates the discussion of faction from text to discourse, and understands faction-writing as an act that is caught up in interpersonal and intersemiotic relations and that exists in actu as a socially encultured practice.Key WordsRhetoric, Discourse, In Cold Blood, Faction, Discursive Act, Referentiality, Textuality, Journalistic Discourse, Novelistic Discourse