Compositional Features of John Steinbeck’s “A Russian Journal”
Abstract
The study aims to identify compositional principles and techniques responsible for integrity of “A Russian Journal” as an example of the travelogue genre. The article presents an overview of opinions concerning correlation of journalistic, publicistic and artistic features of “A Russian Journal”, an interpretation of local and integrating compositional techniques. The research is novel in that it employs an analysis of compositional specifics as one of the means of artistry, which separates it from other works primarily focused on describing and interpreting the content of the text. As a result, it was found that “A Russian Journal” combines description of the events witnessed by Steinbeck in the USSR with the author’s assessment, which is achieved not only by openly expressing the writer’s standpoint but also by the means of transmitting implicit (artistic) meanings including use of the compositional frame technique.