[ecrea] Call for Papers: "Journalism and Experientiality"

*Call for Papers: "Journalism and Experientiality"*

*Thematic issue of Recherches en Communication*

*Deadline for submission: June 29, 2018*

*Languages: English and French*

Paper submissions are invited for a thematic issue of /Recherches en 
Communication/, which will explore the interplay between journalism and 
experience in narrative and literary forms of journalism.

The double nature of narrative literary journalism-as informational and 
experiential-has been recognized by leaders in the field for some time. 
Pulitzer-prize winning reporter and journalism professor Tom French, for 
one, has described narrative journalism as an attempt to help the public 
understand news questions from within, by recreating what it feels like 
to live inside these news questions-be they healthcare, war, or natural 
disasters. Similarly, writer and former director of the Nieman program 
on narrative journalism Mark Kramer explains that literary journalism 
"couples cold fact and personal event, in the author's humane company," 
allowing readers to "behold others' lives, often set within far clearer 
contexts than we can bring to our own. The process moves readers, and 
writers, toward realization, compassion, and in the best of cases, 
wisdom" (Kramer 1995, 34).

Hence, one could say that the meaning of these journalistic narratives 
primarily lies in what narratologists call their experientiality, their 
"quasi-mimetic evocation of real-life experience" (Fludernik 1996, 12). 
Following Marco Caracciolo (2013), experientiality is understood as both 
"the textual representation of experience" and "the experiences 
undergone by the recipients of narrative." It refers to the way a 
narrative stimulates different cognitive parameters through which humans 
engage with real-life experience: embodiment, intentionality, 
temporality and emotional evaluation. By recreating felt experience and 
activating these parameters, narrative and literary journalism does not 
merely try to entertain or move us, but works to deepen our 
understanding of the news and the world we live in. Monika Fludernik 
proposes that degrees of narrativity correspond with levels of 
experientiality (1996, 28), which invites investigation about how 
readers engage cognitively, emotionally, ethically and politically with 
narrative and literary journalism.

This thematic issue aims to broaden our knowledge of both the strategies 
employed by journalists to create vicarious experience for readers 
within literary journalistic texts, and the way readers process and 
react to such texts. The differences between reading fiction and 
non-fiction largely remain to be explored in fields such as cognitive 
narratology, reader-response theory, neuroscience, psychology, 
ethnography and literary studies.

In the case of first-hand reporting by journalists, it may also be 
interesting to question how writing such stories changes the experience 
of the reporters and how this might become part of the story.

Considering the recent evolutions of journalism, the study of 
experientiality should not be limited to the written text, but should 
also concern more innovative forms of narrative/literary journalism, 
such as multimedia, transmedia and interactive narratives.

For this thematic issue, all submissions investigating the relationship 
between narrative/literary journalism and experience are welcome. This 
includes, but is not limited to, papers addressing questions such as:

- How does experientiality translate in works of literary journalism?

- How does the experiential dimension of these texts transform 
journalists' reporting and writing practices?

- How do readers actually react to such texts?

- What is the role of empathy in narrative literary journalism?

- To what extent can literary journalism generate pro-social behavior?

- What kinds of expectations do readers bring to this genre and how are 
these created?

- Are there qualitative differences between the experience of reading 
fiction and non-fiction?

- What kinds of relationships exist between the aesthetic and the 
experiential in literary journalism?

- What kind of experience can multimedia, transmedia and interactive 
journalistic narratives create?

Article submissions must meet the instructions for authors of the 
journal 
(http://sites.uclouvain.be/rec/index.php/rec/about/submissions#authorGuidelines) 
and be uploaded on the journal's website 
(http://sites.uclouvain.be/rec/index.php/rec/about/submissions).

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