Tom Wolfe's New Journalism
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New Journalism
New Journalism was a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included works by himself, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Robert Christgau, and others.
Articles in the New Journalism style tended not to be found in newspapers, but rather in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, CoEvolution Quarterly, Esquire Magazine, New York, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and for a short while in the early 1970s, Scanlan's Monthly.
[edit]History
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The four techniques of realism that he and the other New Journalists employed, he wrote, had been the sole province of novelists and other literati. They are scene-by-scene construction, full record of dialogue, third-person point of view and the manifold incidental details to round out character (i.e., descriptive incidentals).[18] the result
... is a form that is not merely like a novel. It consumes devices that happen to have originated with the novel and mixes them with every other device known to prose. And all the while, quite beyond matters of technique, it enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets what power it has': the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened. The disclaimers have been erased. The screen is gone. The writer is one step closer to the absolute involvement of the reader thatHenry James and James Joyce dreamed of but never achieved.[19]
The essential difference between the new nonfiction and conventional reporting is, he said, that the basic unit of reporting was no longer the datum or piece of information but the scene. Scene is what underlies “the sophisticated strategies of prose.”[20]
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Wolfe had written a two-part semi-fictional parody in New York[65] of the New Yorker and its editor, William Shawn. Reaction notably from New Yorker writers, was loud and prolonged,[66]c but the most significant reaction came from MacDonald, who counterattacked in two articles in the New York Review of Books[67][68] In the first, MacDonald termed Wolfe's approach “parajournalism” and applied it to all similar styles. “Parajournalism,” MacDonald wrote,
... seems to be journalism—“the collection and dissemination of current news”—but the appearance is deceptive. It is a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction.[67]
The New Yorker parody, he added, “... revealed the ugly side of Parajournalism when it tries to be serious.”[67]
In his second article, MacDonald addressed himself to the accuracy of Wolfe's report. He charged that Wolfe “takes a middle course, shifting gears between fact and fantasy, spoof and reportage, until nobody knows which end is, at the moment, up”[68] New Yorker writers Renata Adler and Gerald Jonas joined the fray in the Winter 1966 issue of Columbia Journalism
New Journalism
New Journalism was a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included works by himself, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Robert Christgau, and others.
Articles in the New Journalism style tended not to be found in newspapers, but rather in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, CoEvolution Quarterly, Esquire Magazine, New York, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and for a short while in the early 1970s, Scanlan's Monthly.
[edit]History
[pic]
[pic] …show more content…
The four techniques of realism that he and the other New Journalists employed, he wrote, had been the sole province of novelists and other literati. They are scene-by-scene construction, full record of dialogue, third-person point of view and the manifold incidental details to round out character (i.e., descriptive incidentals).[18] the result
... is a form that is not merely like a novel. It consumes devices that happen to have originated with the novel and mixes them with every other device known to prose. And all the while, quite beyond matters of technique, it enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets what power it has': the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened. The disclaimers have been erased. The screen is gone. The writer is one step closer to the absolute involvement of the reader thatHenry James and James Joyce dreamed of but never achieved.[19]
The essential difference between the new nonfiction and conventional reporting is, he said, that the basic unit of reporting was no longer the datum or piece of information but the scene. Scene is what underlies “the sophisticated strategies of prose.”[20]
[pic] …show more content…
Wolfe had written a two-part semi-fictional parody in New York[65] of the New Yorker and its editor, William Shawn. Reaction notably from New Yorker writers, was loud and prolonged,[66]c but the most significant reaction came from MacDonald, who counterattacked in two articles in the New York Review of Books[67][68] In the first, MacDonald termed Wolfe's approach “parajournalism” and applied it to all similar styles. “Parajournalism,” MacDonald wrote,
... seems to be journalism—“the collection and dissemination of current news”—but the appearance is deceptive. It is a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction.[67]
The New Yorker parody, he added, “... revealed the ugly side of Parajournalism when it tries to be serious.”[67]
In his second article, MacDonald addressed himself to the accuracy of Wolfe's report. He charged that Wolfe “takes a middle course, shifting gears between fact and fantasy, spoof and reportage, until nobody knows which end is, at the moment, up”[68] New Yorker writers Renata Adler and Gerald Jonas joined the fray in the Winter 1966 issue of Columbia Journalism