Assignments

Post: Draft of index

Objectives

• begin to recognize some interesting intersections of literature and journalism;
• know how to create and post a World Wide Web page;
• have begun research on a literary period;
• have begun research on an American literary journalist.

Names and Terms 

• belles-lettres
• genre
• journalism
• literature

Resources

All American is my Internet clearinghouse on American literature, history, and culture.  You can find information about several American authors, links to relevant Internet resources, and other material here.

American Authors on the Web features links to Internet sites on hundreds of authors.  This is a good place to start looking for online texts, as well as other useful information.

The Dictionary of Literary Biography is the best place to begin research on an American writer.  The thorough entries in this series include extensive biographical information, along with bibliographies of primary and secondary sources.

The Press in America is a clear, concise overview of American journalism history, from its origins to modern times.  In addition to describing important figures and trends, it covers issues related to freedom of expression.

American Journalism: A History: 1690-1960 covers important people and developments in American journalism over the past three centuries.

Updated July 2, 2001
© Mark Canada, 2001
mark.canada@uncp.edu
 

Introduction

We begin this week with a general introduction to journalism and literature, considering the meanings of both of those terms, as well as the ways they intersect.

Discussion

Journalism and Literature

The answer depends on what kind of "story" you present.  Is it a strictly factual account of people, places, and events?  Does it primarily tell who, what, when, where, why, and how?  Most of us would probably agree that this kind of story is journalism.  At its core, journalism is an attempt to convey timely, useful information--that is, "news"--to readers or viewers in a truthful way.  It may use sounds and pictures, but its primary vehicle is language.

Is your "story" is an imaginative evocation of the event?  Have you employed creative use of sounds or figurative language?  Is your purpose to elicit an emotional response from your audience?  Have you invented details to deepen the meaning or effect of the story?  We are inclined to think of this kind of story as literature, or belles lettres.  In its various forms--fiction, poetry, drama, even some forms of nonfiction--literature generally seeks to enlighten or move us through the imaginative use of language and incident.

Though different at their cores, journalism and literature are not always distinct.  That is, while some of the qualities described above help to characterize them, they also share a number of similarities.  Both, after all, primarily use language to capture and convey the human experience.  Someone has famously proclaimed that journalism is "history in a hurry," suggesting that news reporters record the events that ultimately tell the story of people on earth.  Similarly, literature often provides glimpses of not only the events of a time period, but the general mentality of its people.  Both journalism and literature also capitalize on interest.  In his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar Allan Poe emphasized the value of originality in creating a poem, and someone else once defined news as something with an unusual quality, noting that a dog biting a man is not news, but a man biting a dog is.  Finally, both journalism and literature seek to effect change or move their audiences.  A newspaper's job, it has been said, is to "raise hell."  Some literary works, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, also raise hell.  Others, such as the satires of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, may effect a different kind of change by making us aware of the weaknesses in our personalities.  Still others--the lyric poems of Poe and William Shakespeare, for example--heighten our awareness of the world or perhaps merely entertain us.  In any case, all literature has some kind of impact.  In short, journalism and literature are similar in many respects.  In fact, we might consider journalism as a literary genre--that is, a type of writing with its own set of conventions.

As we read writings by Benjamin Franklin, Rebecca Harding Davis, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, and other American literary journalists in this course, we will examine the journalistic and literary qualities in their work with an eye toward understanding how the two fields come together in their work.  Here are some questions to keep in mind:

• How did journalism shape the literary styles of those American writers who worked in it?
• What material did it provide for these writers?
• How and why did they make the leap from reporting facts to inventing fiction or vice versa?
• How many other journalists have made the same leap without being detected? 
• What is a fact?  What is the truth?  And what's the difference?

Web Design

Research

Conclusion

Now that we have taken a broad view of literary journalism, we are ready to survey the manifestations of it during the various periods of American history.  We begin next week with a look at literature and journalism in colonial America.