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Your Name Here LITERARY JOURNALISM by JAMES LOVEL (Under the Direction of Leara Rhodes) ABSTRACT Literary Journalism is the least developed form of modern literature. It lacks a precise definition, a common description, a canon and an academic home. Without these conventions, literary journalism has become a bastard form, rejected by both the disciplines from which it was derived. This study addresses these deficiencies by applying mass communication and literary theories to the form to derive a definition and identify the essential elements of the form. The study includes a comprehensive review of the scholarship and the analysis of a dozen books generally classified as literary journalism. The study found that the original intent of the authors who pioneered the form was to create journalism that read like fiction. Modern literary journalism has moved away from this founding definition and the form has become so nebulous that it has little hope of gaining academic credibility. This study suggests returning to the form’s original definition and creating a new scholarship. INDEX WORDS: Literary Journalism, New Journalism, Social Realism LITERARY JOURNALISM by JAMES LOVEL B.A., University of Arkansas, 1983 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS ATHENS, GEORGIA 2007 © 2007 James Lovel All Rights Reserved LITERARY JOURNALISM by JAMES LOVEL Major Professor: Leara Rhodes Committee: Barry Hollander Valerie Boyd Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2007 iv DEDICATION Hi, Lindsey. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER 1 Introduction ...............................................................................................................1 2 Literature Review ....................................................................................................10 3 Methodology ...........................................................................................................36 4 Analysis...................................................................................................................45 5 Conclusion...............................................................................................................90 REFERENCES .........................................................................................................................96 APPENDICES ..........................................................................................................................99 Chapter One Introduction “What the hell is going on? The bastards are making it up. I’m telling you, Ump, that’s a spitball he’s throwing.” Tom Wolfe, 1973. When Tom Wolfe stumbled across an article about former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis in the fall 1962 issue of Esquire magazine, he thought that he had discovered a new literary form. In the article, Gay Talese, a reporter for The New York Times, had blended his reporting with so many devices of fiction writing that “with a little reworking the whole article would have read like a short story,” Wolfe later said of the experience (Wolfe, 10). Wolfe immediately recognized the inherent power of the form: What interested me was not simply the discovery that it was possible to write accurate non-fiction with techniques usually associated with novels and short stories. It was that – plus. It was the discovery that it was possible in non-fiction, in journalism, to use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-consciousness, and to use many different kinds simultaneously, or within a relatively short distance … to excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally (Wolfe, 15). Wolfe, then a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, joined a growing number of reporters and feature writers to begin experimenting with the form. Wolfe published 20 stories in the form for the Herald Tribune’s Sunday magazine supplement, New York, in 1963. He doubled that number the following year and again two years later. He emerged as one of the form’s champions. In 1969, he wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which still is considered one of the best examples of a book written in the form. He later named the form “New 2 Journalism” and wrote a textbook, The New Journalism, in 1973 that included his definition and description of the form and an anthology of examples he compiled. Wolfe’s involvement gave the form initial credibility and helped attract national attention to it. This visibility and credibility expanded as established novelists began experimenting with the form. In 1965, Truman Capote, a former journalist turned novelist, wrote In Cold Blood, a book that remains an icon of the form. Capote called his book a “nonfiction novel” and claimed that he invented the form. Norman Mailer won two Pulitzer Prizes using the form, once for The Armies of the Night (1969) and again for The Executioner’s Song (1980). The contributions from novelists during this period helped define the literary aspects of the form by demonstrating the tools of fiction that worked best with it. For two decades – the 1960s and 1970s – the New Journalism prospered. Journalists and novelists both embraced it. Readers bought it and asked for more. Magazines clamored for the work. Publishers commissioned books. Universities taught it. Wolfe predicted that books written in the form would surpass the novel in popularity and literary status (Wolfe, 9). Yet, the New Journalism was controversial from the beginning. Wolfe and his contemporaries immediately found themselves in the awkward position of defending it from attacks by both literature and journalism critics. Literary critics claimed it wasn’t literary enough to be literature, that its journalism root restricted it to being a lower form of art than the novel. Mainstream journalists were suspicious of the form because it aspired to be literary and, in the process, 3 violated some of the most entrenched basic tenets of the profession. These same arguments, in varying forms, persist today. Wolfe compared the criticism to the objections raised to the modern novel when it emerged in the 18th century. The first modern novels were criticized for their realism, their lack of moral instruction and their omission of the standard romantic literary conventions. Many of the same arguments were made against the New Journalism, claiming it betrayed the conventions of journalism. The New York Times Book Review called it “zoot-suited prose” (Wolfe, 38). The Columbia Journalism Review called it “a bastard form” that was neither literature nor journalism (Wolfe, 24). Despite the successes of the New Journalism for more than two decades, it didn’t replace the novel as the dominant literary form. Even Wolfe abandoned it. After publishing The New Journalism and defending it for a year, he took what he called “the equivalent of a Trappist vow of silence so far as the subject of New Journalism was concerned. I was tired of arguing” (Kramer, 151). He moved on to novels. Critics from both disciplines continued to attack the form from different directions. By the mid-1980s, academic journals and editors pronounced the form dead (Boynton, B11). Wolfe’s textbook is out-of-print. But, the form has survived. It exists under a dozen different names and almost as many different definitions. In fact, it existed before Wolfe and his contemporaries “discovered” it. Most scholars trace the roots of the form to the Social Realism movement in literature at the turn of the 20th century when Stephen Crane and other journalists began writing literary sketches from their 4 observations as journalists (Hartsock, 25). Other scholars place its roots in the early 18th century with the emergence of the modern novel. These scholars include the 1722 novel, A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, as an example to support their hypothesis (Hartsock, 114). Wolfe was skeptical of these genealogies. He was sure that he was part of a new literary movement: The person who asks if the New Journalism is really new often supplies names of writers who he believes did it all years ago, decades ago, even centuries ago. Upon inspection one finds that these writers usually fall into one of four categories: (1) they weren’t writing nonfiction at all – as in the case of Defoe; and Addison and Steele in the “Sir Roger de Coverley Papers”; (2) they were traditional essayists, doing very little reporting and using few if any of the techniques of the New Journalism …; (3) autobiographers; (4) Literary Gentlemen with a Seat in the Grandstand (Wolfe, 42) Wolfe was wrong about the genesis of the form – it didn’t appear out of nowhere, as he thought – but his influence on its development can’t be dismissed. He gave it a definition that made it possible for writers from all disciplines to embrace it and scholars to study and teach it. This contribution created a Golden Age for the form that has never been repeated. However, without Wolfe as a steward, the form fragmented into its current nebulous state. It remains the least developed and least understood form of modern literature. The scholarship has done more to hurt the form’s development than to help it. After the relentless attacks of the scholars in both English and journalism “killed” the form 20 years ago, most critics ignored the work. The few 5 who continued to study it redefined it so broadly that it could include any work of nonfiction, particularly if it were written by a journalist.
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