Albert Chillón, La palabra facticia. Literatura, periodismo y comunicación [The factual/fictional word. Literature, journalism and communication], 2015, 526 p.
Publisher’s description:
Straddling between literature, journalism and audio-visual communication, very different expressive modes integrate the contemporary word “facticia” [according to this blogger’s understanding a mix of the words “factual” and “fictional” (“ficticia” in Spanish)] -improperly called “non-fiction”-, whose mimetic vocation looks to give testimony, through witnesses or by documentary, of realities that are happening. “Facticia”, because it is a mimesis of true intention and truthseeking procedure, but still mimesis; because it puts the social facts (factum) into words; and because in doing so it does not limit itself to their referral, but it gives them workmanship.
It thus attracts the attention that the literary studies as well as the self-styled sciences of communication have tended to ignore this decisive scope, that this work’s matrix, Literatura y periodismo. Una tradición de relaciones promiscuas [Literature and journalism. A tradition of promiscuous relations], tackled in 1999 in a systematic and pioneering way. Since its publication, the book has been recognized as an essential reference by numerous Latin American and Spanish academics and as a shared source of inspiration by a lot of journalists on both sides of the Atlantic. 15 years have passed though, and that volume has grown -the same tree whose trunk adds concentric successive rings- to become the one that the readers hold in their hands: not simply a second edition, but a genuine, notably enlarged and updated version.
As was the aim of its matrix, La palabra facticia. Literatura, periodismo y comunicación explores from a comparative point of view the multiple links between the journalistic culture and the literary. Even though now it widens its focus to encompass the neighboring audiovisual and digital narratives -whose documentary and testimonial tributaries, added to the traditional journalistic literature and to the most innovative currents of literary journalism, form the vast flow of the workd “facticia” of our days.
The readers can find a lot of the old book in the new one, so that they can get to know the inherited traditions as well as the most recent tendencies. But they can also venture into an initial theory section that far exceeds the original -that the novelty and marrow of this version-, consegrated to the ways in which post-modernity has encouraged the rise of the “facticial” narratives as their hybridization with the ficticious ones; to the vast and subtle influence of tradition in the journalistic and mediatic imagery; to the incidence of the linguistic turn in the understanding of communication, literature and journalism; and finally to the same workmanship of social acts, from now on understood as constructions of meaning and not as simple things.
Albert Chillón (Barcelona, 1960), essayist and writer, is professor of Communication Theory and director of the Master in Communication, Journalism and Letters of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. …
SOURCE: UAB (publisher)
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