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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.
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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. Frus also takes up the problem of how we determine both the truth of historical events such as the Holocaust and the fictional or factual status of narratives about them. Frus first examines narratives by Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway, showing that conventional understanding of the categories of fiction and nonfiction frequently determines the differences we perceive in texts, differences we imagine are determined by common sense. When journalists writing about historical events adopt the Hemingwayesque, understated narrative style that is commonly associated with both "objectivity" and "literature" (John Hersey is one example), the reader sees the damage done by the wholesale construction of literature as a "pure," nonfunctional art: it leads to an audience unable to face the historical and social conditions in which it must function. She interprets New Journalistic narratives by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Janet Malcolm, suggesting by her critical practice ways to counter the reification of modern consciousness to which both objective journalism and aestheticized fiction contribute. The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative The Timely and the Timeless PHYLLIS FRUS Vanderbilt University CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521443241 © Cambridge University Press 1994 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1994 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Frus, Phyllis. The politics and poetics of journalistic narrative : the timely and the timeless / Phyllis Frus. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-521-44324-5 1. American prose literature - 20th century - History and criticism. 2. Politics and literature - United States - History - 20th century. 3. Reportage literature, American - History and criticism. 4. Journalism - United States - History - 20th century. 5. Nonflction novel - History and criticism. 6. Narration (Rhetoric). I. Title. PS366. R44F78 1994 818/50809-dc20 94-6273 CIP ISBN 978-0-521-44324-1 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2008 To my parents, Roy Frus and Nelle Bennett Frus, and my son, Craig McCord: "it was more than enough" Contents<