American Literary Journalism

Literary journalism merges the factual reporting of traditional journalism with the narrative techniques of fiction. This course will follow the development of this influential genre of writing in the U.S. from the 1890s to the present, with special attention to the particularly American emergence of this form in the non-fiction writing published in the New Yorker during the 1930s and 40s and the New Journalism of the 1960s and 70s. Engaging with the form¿s most prominent writers, themes, and techniques, we will investigate questions of objectivity and subjectivity, tensions between fact and fiction, and the genre¿s position as a particularly American cultural form.