ABSTRACT
The linguistic claim to phenomenal referentiality—the “reality boundary”—is central to understanding a narrative literary journalism as a distinctive genre of journalism and literature. The aesthetics of everyday experience provides a promising point of embarkation into understanding the complex nature of the discourse’s referentiality, highlighting the carnivalesque of experience derived from the intersection of one time and place in space, which inherently are distinctive from other times and places. Thus we are confronted with the “inconclusive” or “open-ended” present of the chronotope of experience that challenges us in the interpretive act with distinctive novel experiences that can disrupt taken-for-granted cultural and personal assumptions, in effect estranging us from what was once familiar. In turn, the referentiality of literary journalism always resists coming to closure and is always fluid. For these reasons, one can detect how the genre differs from more conventional models of journalism oriented epistemologically toward objectification and abstraction. Similarly, one can detect how the genre differs from conventional fictions because the former is always a genre forever in a state of becoming. This focus reminds us of the central role the aesthetics of the everyday plays in the overall construction of a narrative literary journalism, a genre that in challenging cultural constructions is fundamentally subversive.
