Fictitious Nonfiction: Fiktionalisierungs- und Erzählstrategien in der zeitgenössischen amerikanischen Dokumentarprosa

Abstract

’The Nonfiction Novel,’ or, ‘The New Journalism,’ are terms that have been used in an attempt to describe a type of novel that, since the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in 1965 has come to play a major role in the American literary scene. The claims to authenticity in the so-called documentary novel present a challenge to the now familiar fictional technique of subjectivity and experiment. The new documentary novel, in contrast to this, signals the return of the outmoded narrator. Omniscient narration, together with the mode of showing, using elements of the setting as symbolic comments, constitutes the literalness of Capote, Mailer and Wolfe. This revival of techniques important to the traditional novel seems to have contributed not to the much affirmed death of the novel, but to the “death of the death of the novel.”