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Literary Journalism and the Making of Social Knowledge

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Literary Journalism and the Making of Social Knowledge TRUE STORIES: LITERARY JOURNALISM AND THE MAKING OF SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE by William Keats-Osborn B.A., The University of British Columbia, 2007 M.A., Simon Fraser University, 2010 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Sociology) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2018 © William Keats-Osborn, 2018 The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: True Stories: Literary Journalism and the Making of Social Knowledge in partial fulfillment of the requirements submitted by William Keats-Osborn for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology Examining Committee: Neil Gross Co-supervisor Tom Kemple Co-supervisor Amy Hanser Supervisory Committee Member Seth Abrutyn University Examiner Mary Lynn Young University Examiner Additional Supervisory Committee Members: Deborah Campbell Supervisory Committee Member Shyon Baumann Supervisory Committee Member - ii - ABSTRACT One way of thinking about culture is as a means through which structured relationships between people, objects, or meanings are reproduced over time. Using the case of literary journalism, I examine this process by investigating how members of the social world involved in producing literary magazine features collaborate to anticipate the responses and criticisms of an as-yet- unknown public audience by theorizing about the principles and methods particular readers will likely use to make sense of the article once it’s published. This project is based on forty-three primary and over a hundred and seventy-four secondary interviews, in addition to a variety of lectures, articles, panel discussions, and archival materials, selected instrumentally for their capacity to illuminate typical cases, and analyzed using an abductive logic. It traces the production of a typical magazine feature from conception to publication, through the activities of reporting, writing, editing, and fact-checking. I highlight that although reporters and editors develop an embodied capacity for doing their work in roughly the correct way through experience as contributory members of the social world, each member’s idiosyncratic background leads to divergent conceptions of right and wrong in any given interaction; solutions to these disparities have to be negotiated by reference to social objects that are understood to be commonplace among members (including “rules” of genre, structure, fairness, identity, and facticity). As members work toward a consensus, the text-in-progress is revised to account for the members’ divergent ways of seeing, and it develops a capacity to withstand an increasingly diverse range of potential readings; at the same time, any individual’s conception of the rules is clarified. By the time the text is published, and the response of a public readership can be observed, the piece can be read in conjunction with the public response as evidence of the existence and nature of cultural schemas that were purported to have governed its development, - iii - thus providing a resource for applying the rules correctly to future projects. This approach highlights how the form and content of even a true account of reality is structured by the obdurate character of social accountability. - iv - LAY SUMMARY This project examines the production of literary journalism, using a magazine feature as a typical case. It involves a detailed investigation of the day-to-day work involved in reporting, writing, editing, and fact-checking such an article, with particular attention paid to the way the people involved in the process do their work with the expectations of their peers in mind. Considering magazine features as literary works whose production emphasizes their fidelity to the empirical world, a closer look at how these articles are made can illuminate links between the production of knowledge and the production of culture. Understanding the practical details of collaborative work like this provides a way of thinking about the relationship between specialized research methods and their consumption by a public audience, where the researchers serve as a focus group of sorts whose job it is to anticipate a wide range of public interpretations. - v - PREFACE This dissertation is an original intellectual product of the author, Will Keats-Osborn. The fieldwork reported in Chapters 4 through 7 was covered by the UBC Behavioural Research Ethics Board certificate H14-02769. Ira Glass’s show notes in Chapter 5, under the heading “Structuring in Practice,” are courtesy of Andy Orin at the blog Lifehacker. The photograph of Robert Caro’s office in the same section is courtesy of Martine Fougeron / Getty. - vi - TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. iii LAY SUMMARY ..................................................................................................................... iii PREFACE ................................................................................................................................. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ......................................................................................................... vii LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................. xi GLOSSARY ............................................................................................................................ xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................................................xiv DEDICATION .........................................................................................................................xvi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................1 Literary Journalism? ................................................................................................................5 A Brief History ........................................................................................................................9 The “World” of Literary Journalism ...................................................................................... 18 Puzzling Out the Rules .......................................................................................................... 23 Literary Journalism and the Public Record ............................................................................. 29 The Structure of this Dissertation ........................................................................................... 34 CHAPTER 2: THEORIES AND LITERATURE ...................................................................... 38 Journalism as a Sociological Problem .................................................................................... 41 Genre as a Social World ........................................................................................................ 46 Sociology of Knowledge ....................................................................................................... 51 Culture as a Local, Everyday Process .................................................................................... 56 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 63 CHAPTER 3: METHODS ........................................................................................................ 67 Core Cases............................................................................................................................. 68 Magazines .......................................................................................................................... 69 People ................................................................................................................................ 73 Interviews .............................................................................................................................. 80 Privacy and Identification ...................................................................................................... 83 Additional Data Sources ........................................................................................................ 86 Interviews and Practices ........................................................................................................ 90 Analysis ................................................................................................................................ 93 - vii - CHAPTER 4: REPORTING ..................................................................................................... 97 Structure ................................................................................................................................ 99 Structuring as you go ....................................................................................................... 106 Choosing a Subject .............................................................................................................. 110 Topics and cases .............................................................................................................. 110 Aligning cases with topics ...............................................................................................
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