Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: True Stories
- Acknowledgments
- 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: 1960s 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
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - Other American New Journalisms: 1960s New Journalism as “Other”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: True Stories
- Acknowledgments
- 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: 1960s 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
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
A clever and energetic man has lately invented a new journalism, full of ability, novelty, variety, sensation, sympathy, generous instincts; its one great fault is that it is feather-brained.
– Matthew Arnold, Nineteenth Century (May 1887)Everyone has a different definition of what the New Journalism is. It's the use of fictional techniques, it's composite characterization, it's the art form that's replacing the novel, which is dying. Or it's anyone who used to write for the old Herald Tribune magazine, it's participation in the event by the writer, it's the transcendence of objectivity, it's anyone who makes up quotes, it's anyone who hangs out at the Lion's Head bar.
– Jack Newfield, “Journalism: Old, New and Corporate” (1970)By taking the fiction-to-journalism relationship as exemplary, we have explored one version of how the fiction-nonfiction split came to be. Now we can draw on those histories of objectivity in fiction and journalism to account for readers' and critics' sometimes vehement responses to practices that seem to blur the boundaries between these exemplary modes of literary and nonliterary discourse. Because I do not separate these categories, other than to acknowledge that literature is what we have decided to regard as such and, following Edmund Wilson, to define journalism as writing for periodicals (Letters 353), we are not faced with the problems of quantitative assessment and arbitrariness that plague definitions based on finding particular properties.
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- Information
- The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative , pp. 120 - 156Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994