Literatura e Jornalismo: Fato e ficção em Abusado e Cidade de Deus

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ABSTRACT
This thesis reflects on what is known as literary journalism and on the
appropriateness of this term to refer to journalistic texts that take a
narrative form – a practice that coincides with rise of the modern novel
as a literary genre. The historical development of journalism is traced
along with the way it has come to distinguish itself from literary writing.
The focus then shifts to the narrative features of so-called literary
journalism – using Walter Benjamin’s critical theory of the narrator and
the decline of experience in traditional narrative and the theory of the
replacement of the classical with the post-modern narrator, as
propounded by Silviano Santiago. Wolfgang Iser’s theory of fictional
construction is then used to understand what is meant by the fictional in
literature and in journalism and the interrelation of fact and fiction as a
crucial mechanism in the production and reproduction of social reality
and the management of social changes in post-industrial society, which
are strongly governed by the communications media. The differences
between fact and fiction in terms of the pact with the reader are also
addressed. This theoretical groundwork is then used to investigate the
narrative dimension of the journalistic report and its connections with
literature, using the relation between fiction and reality as a way of
understanding that between journalism and literature, by way of an
analysis of the journalistic novel, Abusado, by Caco Barcellos, and the
fictional novel, Cidade de Deus, by Paulo Lins.
Key words: Literature, Literary Journalism, Narrative, Fiction.