History or journalism: Two narrative paradigms in "Bloody Sunday. Scenes from the Saville Inquiry" by Richard Norton-Taylor
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Date
2007
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
The article focuses on one of the most controversial plays in contemporary Irish theatre, Richard
Norton-Taylor’s Bloody Sunday. Scenes from the Saville Inquiry. The play belongs to the popular
form of drama called verbatim or documentary and attempts to render factual material and recorded
evidence about the Bloody Sunday tragedy in a possibly most objective and reliable way.
The aim of the article is to present Norton-Taylor’s work against the long and interesting tradition
of the genre of documentary theatre. What is more, the central subject of the analysis is the complex
interconnection between journalistic methods of rendering facts and strictly fictional strategies
– such as for instance metaphor, metonymy or synecdoche – which according to Hayden
White belong to modern historical discourse. The seamless blurring of journalism and elements of
historical writing makes it possible for Norton-Taylor to maintain realistic objectivity of the
medium, while still holding the reader’s interpretations and understanding under politicised and
ideologically biased control.
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Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 43 (2007), pp. 305-314
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0081-6272