The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative [Hardcover]

The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative investigates the textuality of all discourse.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.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.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 by the writing of New Journalists and nonfiction novelists. In her book Frus recovers and renegotiates the process of writerly creation, and proves that, ultimately, the observer is implicated in the means of observation.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. Anyone concernedl£.