The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative

The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative investigates the textuality of all discourse.

Phyllis Frus (Author)

9780521443241, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 June 1994

320 pages
23.7 x 15.7 x 2.7 cm, 0.575 kg

"Anyone concerned with the media--print, film, television, or others--should welcome Frus's serious inquiry into liminal areas of representation." David Halliburton, American Literature

The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative investigates the textuality of all discourse, arguing that the ideologically charged distinction between 'journalism' and 'fiction' is socially constructed rather than natural. Phyllis Frus separates literariness from aesthetic definitions, regarding it as a way of reading a text through its style to discover how it 'makes' reality. Frus examines narratives by Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway, showing that conventional understanding of the categories of fiction and non-fiction frequently determines the differences we perceive in texts. When journalists writing about historical events adopt the Hemingway-esque, understated narrative style that is commonly associated with both 'objectivity' and 'literature', it leads to an audience unable to face the historical and social conditions in which it must function. She interprets New Journalistic narratives, such as that of Truman Capote, as ways to counter the reification of modern consciousness to which both objective journalism and aestheticised fiction contribute.

Preface: True stories
Acknowledgements
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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]