I’ve never been a big fan of defining “literary” journalism—or coming up with a specific set of aesthetic criteria for studying it. To be sure, what I often call this “is it or isn’t it” question was once seen as important to for achieving broader academic acceptance.… Read More
When scholars talk about why readers sink their teeth into works of literary or narrative journalism, customarily they focus on a feeling of immersion, or being “caught up in the story” and/or its descriptive details. As John Hartsock has emphasized, the longform writer dispenses with the so-called… Read More
It isn’t often remembered that one of the leading entries in Norm Sims’ field-opening collection Literary Journalism in the 20th Century (2007) was a pairing of two essays by Mary McCarthy, “Artists in Uniform” and “Settling the Colonel’s Hash,” both from the 1950s. (The latter sometimes appears as “Unsettling…”).… Read More
For much of my time in universities, I taught standard literary-history courses—mostly American literature from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. But a funny thing happened when I started teaching narrative journalism: I learned that students in my classes would often investigate, online, what had eventually happened to… Read More
It’s a cliché that failure is often the best teacher. But that goes for journalism, too – that is, nothing so clearly clarifies the rules of narrative journalism so much as rule-breaking can. By “rule breaking,” though, I mean two very different things. First, there are those… Read More
Students have often asked me: what’s the best way to see narrative journalists “putting it all together?”— that is, how do leading reporters move from (1) getting a story idea, to (2) deciding on the legwork they need to do, to (3) actually writing a story? In… Read More
Searching around the web, it’s easy enough to locate very fine samples of syllabi focusing on the teaching of literary or narrative journalism. The IALJS has a terrific list of its own, and there are other excellent samples you can find, e.g. from Josh Roiland (annotated on the… Read More
A Teaching Thought: I’ve often wondered why there isn’t more frequent “currency” between visual studies (particularly art history and photography) and the study of narrative journalism. Aside from the obvious synergy with documentary photography in Jacob Riis’ or James Agee’s work, or the example of Joan Didion’s… Read More
I’ve always regretted the fact that I never had a chance to teach Aleksandar Hemon‘s “The Aquarium” in a narrative journalism class. If you don’t know it–it’s reprinted in Hemon’s The Book of My Lives (2013), and you sometimes see it online–it tells the heart-wrenching story of the fact that Hemon’s… Read More