The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative

Early in the twentieth century, journalism and fiction suffered a forced separation as a result of two coinciding trends: a popular tendency to treat literature as an elevated, aesthetic category and the emergence of objective narrative in journalism. The effect of these two forces was to distance the subject of the narrative from its object, an estrangement later challenged - to substantial critical resistance - by the writing of New Journalists and nonfiction novelists. Using a technique of ‘reflexive reading’, Frus recovers and re-negotiates the process of writerly creation, and proves that, ultimately, the observer is implicated in the means of observation. Writers discussed include Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, John Hersey, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Janet Malcolm.

• Strong historical, contextualising treatment of literary media • Interdisciplinary scope (journalism, literature, communications) • Overview of both the reader and the text in the twentieth century

Preface; True stories; Introduction; what isn\'t literature?; 1. Writing after the fact: Crane, journalism and fiction; 2. ‘News that stays’: Hemingway, journalism, and objectivity in fiction; 3. News that fits: the construction of journalistic objectivity; 4. Other American new journalisms: 1960’s new journalism as ‘other’; 5. The ‘Incredibility of Reality’ and the ideology of form; 6. Freud and our ‘Wolfe Man’: The ‘Right Stuff’ and the concept of belatedness; Conclusion; Notes.