Thursday, 15th May 2008
Session 1 9.00 - 9:30
Introduction and Welcome
John S. Bak (I.D.E.A., Nancy-Université,
France)
João Bilhim, Director, ISCSP (Universidade Técnica
de Lisboa, Portugal)
Session 2 9.30 - 10.30 Poster/Work-in-Progress
Session I
Session Title: "Literary Journalism: Process
and Prospect"
(NOTE: Poster Presentations are 10 minutes each)
Moderator: Sam G. Riley (Virginia Tech, University
U.S.A.)
1. Douglas Whynott (Emerson College, U.S.A.), "Observations
on Nonfiction Book Structures"
Books that fall into the category of literary journalism, or narrative
nonfiction, often utilize some common narrative structures. Writers
use these structures but also innovate upon them. The author presents
observations on these structures, and how they work, with analysis
of Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains and House, (5-part
structures), Seabiscuit and Travels with the Archdruid (3-part
structure), In Cold Blood and Driving Mr. Albert (4-part structures),
and A Civil Action and Beautiful Swimmers (12-part structures),
and other books. Though awareness of these structures and their
functions do not necessarily provide outlines for the composition
of book-length narratives, such structures can provide pathways
toward organization of materials, as well as serve as a useful
tool for the teacher of techniques of literary journalism. Knowledge
of these structures can also shed light on a particular writer's
method.
2. Mike Doherty (Post-doctoral fellow, The London Consortium,
U.K.), "'Being in the World': Fiction Writers and Literary
Journalism after 9/11"
As Martin Amis has noted, "An unusual number of novelists chose
to write some journalism about September 11." For Amis, these
novelists "were playing for time," as their imagination had been
"fully commandeered." Focusing on 9/11 and its aftermath, my paper
will consider fiction writers' use of journalism as a means not
just of stalling, but of finding new ways to fashion narrative
out of events that seem to stop time. I will discuss a set of
fiction writers' journalistic essays, taking as a theoretical
starting point Zadie Smith's conception of the fiction writer's
"personality" as a "manner of being in the world." Writing fiction
subsumes this "personality" into style; by reporting on events
and reflecting on them journalistically, one can make explicit
one's way of structuring thought and experience. Literary journalism
about traumatic events is often understood in terms of bearing
witness or giving testimony; it can also enable a writer to work
through stasis and understand trauma as part of a larger narrative.
Indeed, fiction writers' responses to 9/11 tend to report on and
rail against a sense of narrative disruption, from Philip Lopate's
observation that the attack was an "affront to one's proper autobiographical
arc" to A.M. Homes's sense that her imagination was "stilled"
to Paul Auster's evocation of New Yorkers waiting in darkness
on a stalled subway car. A work of literary journalism, I argue,
can combat paralysis, kick-start the imagination, and reassert
the value of the written word against terrorism's propaganda of
the deed.
3. Nathalie Collé (I.D.E.A., Nancy-Université, France),
"Literary Journalism and the French Concours"
To become a secondary school teacher in France, one has to pass
either the C.A.P.E.S. or the more difficult Agrégation concours,
both competitive state exams. Of the many individual exams which
make up both concours, there is a "Synthèse de documents" exam,
which collects three documents (one literary, one historical,
and one visual) on a similar theme or issue and asks students
to analyse and present them to a jury in a synthetic manner, that
is, to find parallel themes, concepts, images, etc., and formulate
a coherent argument about them, with necessary reference to their
contexts of production. I have taught a course on how to prepare
for this exam for nearly eight years now, and this past year I
decided to prepare a dossier entitled "Literary Journalism and
the American Depression." The dossier contained the following
three texts: a "literary" passage from James Agee's Now Let Us
Praise Famous Men (1941), a Walker Evans photograph from The Passengers
(1938-41), and an interview from Stud Terkel's Hard Times: An
Oral History of the American Depression (1970). While nearly any
theme or type of text can potentially be used to prepare a dossier,
I felt that literary journalism was most appropriate because it
allowed students to tap into the rich literary and journalistic
cultures of America during the Depression era. Many will have
already read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, as it also
is on this year's concours programme, so they will have had the
necessary background to examine the Agee text and appreciate the
photograph by Evans as well as the interview from Terkel. This
allowed me to focus more with the students on the impact of the
literary journalistic elements found in each document. In French
academic society, where one has to be either a literature specialist
or a "civilization" specialist (or a linguist), I have found literary
journalism the perfect genre to demonstrate how one can and should
be both. Since each text is an example of literary journalism
in its own right-Agee's prose description of the Ricketts' fireplace
is as poetic as it is journalistic in detail; Evan's photo of
railroad travellers is as narrative as it is photojournalistic;
and Terkel's interview with Jim Sheridan is as dramatic in nature
as it is historical in fact-they all serve to show that there
is no clear-cut distinction between the literary text, the civilization
text, and the photographic text, and that they all narrate the
same (his)story (or at least that is what the students are supposed
to develop in their synthèses) while historically documenting
a precise moment in the life of an individual or a nation. They
breakdown the distinctions assigned to varying "genres" and demonstrate
instead the unity of "texts." Literary journalism, then, proves
to be the best example of where the boundaries between aestheticism
and objectivism blur when humanity is concerned.
4. Sharon Norris (Roehampton University, U.K.), "Schindler's
Ark or Schindler's List: Fact, Fiction or Both"
In 1982 the Booker Prize, Britain's top literary award, went to
Schindler's Ark, by the Australian author, Thomas Keneally. The
problem, for some critics at least, was that the Booker's rules
state clearly that the prize is awarded to 'the best full-length
work of fiction'. While the book was published as fiction in Britain,
in America (where it appeared as Schindler's List), it was listed
as non-fiction. Keneally's "Author's Note" to the text confuses
things further. While he admits to having used 'the texture and
devices of a novel', and to having found it necessary to 'reconstruct
conversations', he states that he has 'attempted to avoid all
fiction'. In a BBC interview from 2007, Keneally added further
fuel to the debate, by acknowledging that Schindler's Ark 'should
never have won the Booker Prize', as it 'isn't fiction'. This
paper argues that the difficulties in categorising Keneally's
book shed light on wider boundary issues relating to the definitions
of 'literary journalism' and 'literary non-fiction'. However,
it also argues that the nature of the debate surrounding Schindler's
Ark reveals both a literary culture (in the UK at least) too narrowly
focused on a notionally clear-cut fiction/non-fiction divide,
and the continued existence of a literary hierarchy that continues
to privilege literary fiction above all else. In discussing these
issues, the paper's author draws on her own earlier work on the
Booker Prize.
Q&A - 10 minutes total
Session 3 10.45 - 11.45 Research Paper
Session I
Session Title: "Literary Journalism's Role
in Contemporary National Traditions"
(NOTE: Research Paper Presentations are 15 minutes
each)
Moderator: Isabel Santos (Universidade Técnica
de Lisboa, Portugal)
1. Beate Josephi (Edith Cowan University, Australia),
Christine Müller (BiTS, Germany), "Eyewitness or Foreign
Eyes? Differences Between German and Australian Literary Journalism"
Australian author Anna Funder's Stasiland was one of the literary
successes of 2003. Her book details the lives and sufferings of
citizens in the former German Democratic Republic under its internal
state security. Stasiland, which has been called in the Sunday
Times "a masterpiece of investigative analysis, written almost
like a novel, with a perfect mix of compassion and distance",
is seen as one of the best exponents of current Australian literary
journalism. Given its subject matter, it is ideally suited as
a case study to highlight the differences between German and Australian
notions of literary journalism. This article discusses the demands
of verifiability and authenticity made on literary journalism,
which vary in the two countries, as does the legal framework surrounding
the genre. Both aspects would have made it impossible for Stasiland
to have been written in Germany.
2. Jane Johnston (Griffith University, Australia), "Inside
'Inside Story': Literary Journalism Meets Investigative Reporting
- A Case Study"
American literary journalist Mark Kramer argues that newspaper
stories should be a narrative mix of intensive reporting with
dramatic presentation (cited in Blair, 2006). This paper presents
a case study of such a mix as it profiles the Australian newspaper's
'Inside Story', a series of page 1 stories that blend a range
of newspaper styles and characteristics, including literary journalism,
hard news and investigative reporting in Australia's only national
daily broadsheet. It supports the view that, while it can be useful
to distinguish between varieties of news such as hard and soft,
news and features, such divisions are indeed outdated, as the
case study brings together literary style into hard news topics,
using investigative techniques. 'Inside Story' is unique in the
Australian media landscape for a variety of reasons, and one former
editor, now working in Bangkok, suggests it may be unlike any
other in the world. This paper presents an inside view of 'Inside
Story', tracking its genesis back to the 1960s and its development
since that time. It includes interviews with current and former
journalists and editors who have worked on 'Inside Story' and
on stories that laid its foundations, and it analyses three editions
of the series which are used to illustrate its blend of character,
style and technique. It concludes that 'Inside Story' may be considered
a model for engaging with the reader from the first page of the
daily paper.
3. Bill Reynolds (Ryerson University Canada), "Like a Novella:
The Golden Age of Canadian Literary Journalism"
In his book, A History of American Literary Journalism, Professor
John Hartsock found a precursor to the New Journalism of the 1960s
and 1970s in the rougher, newsier journalism world of the 1890s-an
antecedent also dubbed the New Journalism. I wondered whether
or not Canada had followed, perhaps belatedly, a parallel path,
and lately I have been searching for signs of first-wave New Journalism
during the same time frame (and after). The search has proved
more difficult than anticipated, with fleeting glimpses but no
real substance until the 1950s. In the course of this research
(which is ongoing), what has become obvious is that Canada in
the 1960s and 1970s, following the lead set by the twin pillars
of Clay Felker's New York Magazine and Harold Hayes's Esquire,
enjoyed a boom in what has come to be known as literary journalism.
In Toronto-based magazines such as Star Weekly, Weekend and Toronto
Life, the genre we now refer to as literary journalism found happy
homes. If Canada's magazine industry is today ruled by one specific
category-women's service magazines-it was not always so. The exhilaration
of the New Journalism, forever captured by Tom Wolfe's famous
1973 manifesto, "Like a Novel," instantly infected a willing and
eager generation of Canadian editors and writers with the virus
we now commonly call literary journalism. This presentation dwells
on the peculiarly Canadian echo of the American explosion in literary
journalism-its origin, its rise, its accomplishments and, alas,
its decline.
Q&A - 15 minutes total
Session 4 12.00 - 12.45 Keynote Speech
Introduction: David Abrahamson (Northwestern University,
U.S.A.)
Keynote: Tom Connery (University of St. Thomas,
U.S.A.),
"Literary Journalism's Critique of Conventional
Journalism: Historical Origins and Contemporary Issues"
Q&A - 15 minutes total
Lunch 12.45 - 14.15
Session 5 14.15 - 15.15 Panel I
Panel Title: "Teaching Literary Journalism:
As Writing"
Moderator: Alice Trindade (Universidade Técnica
de Lisboa, Portugal)
Susan Greenberg (Roehampton University, U.K.)
Paulo Moura (Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa, Portugal)
Bill Reynolds (Ryerson University, Canada)
Patsy Sims (Goucher College, U.S.A.)
Q&A - 15 minutes total
Session 6 15.30 - 16.30 Poster/Work-in-Progress
Session II
Session Title: "Literary Journalism's Sustaining
National Themes"
Moderator: Edvaldo Lima (Universidade de São
Paulo, Brazil)
1. Douglas O. Cumming (Washington and Lee University,
U.S.A.), "Desperate Southern Gentlemen: Expatriates of the
South in New Journalism of the 1960s"
The press of the American South for most of its history remained
stunted by pro-slavery polemics, by the lack of large cities and,
between the end of the Civil War and the civil rights movement,
by what Charlotte News editor W.J. Cash called "the savage ideal"
- the suppression of dissent regarding the region's apartheid
racial structures. But throughout this history, certain literary
journalists in the South developed a creative, if ambivalent,
relationship with commercial publishing centers in the north,
particularly in New York. Such literary journalists range from
Edgar Allan Poe to George Washington Cable, from Lafcadio Hearn
to Walter Hines Page to a small number of liberal journalists
inspired by H.L. Mencken's campaign to liberate the "Sahara of
the Bozart" in the 1920s. Bolstered by this historical background,
and in some ways repeating it, journalists from the South played
a unique and disproportionate role in what came to be called New
Journalism, the anti-objective magazine reportage that embraced
fictional techniques to represent the cultural upheavals of the
1960s. Tom Wolfe, the Virginia-educated son of a Southern Planter
editor, teamed with Esquire editor Harold Hayes, the North Carolina-educated
son of a Baptist preacher. Other examples are George Leonard at
Look magazine, Marshall Frady, Larry L. King and Willie Morris
at Harper's, and Hunter Thompson, the original "desperate Southern
gentleman" from Louisville. This work-in-progress argues from
biography, history and text that such figures played a characteristic
role as Southern outsiders in this journalism-reform movement.
It relates to research I am doing for a book on the history of
the Southern press.
2. Chen Peiqin (Shanghai International Studies University, China),
"Social Movements and Chinese Literary Reportage"
Chinese Literary Reportage, Bao Gao Wen Xue, designated as a literary
genre in the 1930s during the Chinese anti-Japanese war, has been
considered by most Chinese literary critics as the best genre
to expose social evils, and to call for people to take actions
against social evils. Chinese literary reportage has been closely
related with social movements since its emergence. This paper
is to explore the role of literary reportage in the major social
movements in China by reviewing the classic works of the genre,
ranging from the early classics like Xia Yan's Slave Workers to
present day influential works such as Chen Guilu's An Investigation
of Chinese Peasants. By studying the major classics of literary
reportage in different periods against their social backgrounds,
this paper is to argue that the development of Chinese literary
reportage has always been closely related with the social movement
of its time and the flourishing of Chinese literary reportage
has actually been rooted in sharp social conflicts of different
times. At present day, when China is in a great transitional period,
literary reportage has again drawn great attention from the public
by targeting social problems like the life of modern Chinese peasants,
corruption, environment and education.
3. Ömer Özer (Anadolu University, Turkey), "An
Analysis of the Importance of Interviews regarding the Interviews
of Augusto Pinochet and Cengiz Israfil"
The reportage is one of the important genres in Journalism. It
is a descriptive kind of Journalism style; but it is different
from interview since it contains the interview. For example, novel
can be also considered as reportage. In interviews, subject is
limited and certain questions are asked and it is really important
for journalism practice. Interviews should not be unbiased. If
it is believed that interviews are very informative, then it can
be taken as a satisfactory one. There are three types of the interviews:
planned, semi-planned and unplanned. In this study, we analyze
the two interviews: the first is done by Nilgün Cerraho?lu, who
is interviewed the Augusto Pinochet of Chilean dictator, and the
second is carried out by one of the famous journalists Emin Çöla?an,
who is questioned the former head of the privatization institution
of Turkey in late 1980s. We select these two interviews, because
of techniques used and efficiency of the interviews in terms of
the hard time given to the persons in charge. In our analysis,
we examine the attitudes of journalists, the structure and organization
of the questions, attitudes of interviewers, and extent of the
interviews providing the information about the contents of interviews.
Also, based on above information, we try to classify the type
of interviews and evaluate them.
4. Leonora Flis (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia), "Louis
Adamic - Slovenian-American Journalistic Voice of a New, Democratic
Post-WW II Europe"
Louis Adamic (1898 - 1951), probably the most prolific American
writer of Slovenian descent left an indelible mark on the political
activity and literary work of Slovene Americans. Moreover, already
in the 1930s and 1940s, his journalistic pieces (in Harper's,
The Nation, The Saturday Review of Literature etc.) and novelistic
texts, offered a prophetic vision of a free and unified Europe
(he termed it "The United States of Europe"). In addition to that,
Adamic gave a carefully structured proposition on America's role
in the reconstruction of the post-WW II Europe while, simultaneously,
criticizing America's isolating individualism. Being a keen social
observer, Adamic in his writings, which are mostly first person
documentary narratives, internalized the rhetoric of social and
political reportage, dramatized his compulsion to be involved
in the subject matter and denied his readers a complacent, non-critical
reading stance. Like a proper literary journalist, Adamic demands
a reaction, active engagement in his storytelling. He received
endorsements from such esteemed literary figures as Upton Sinclair,
Sherwood Anderson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, President F. D. Roosevelt
and Harry S. Truman invited him to the White House, and, last
but not least, he received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1932. This
enabled him to travel to Yugoslavia and write his book The Native's
Return (1934), which became a bestseller in the U.S.. With this
unique narrative, combining features of a travelogue, political
and social commentary as well as an ethnological study, Adamic
established himself as a negotiator and an interpreter between
the European (Yugoslavian) and American cultures. His plans for
the post-WW II renewal were expressed again in his 1941 book Two-Way
Passage, and two years later in My Native Land. We will show how
Adamic, an avid reader of Theodore Dreiser, James Agee and Henry
.B. Adams, represents a distinctive take on literary journalism
in the first half of the 20th century. And furthermore, how this
immigrant writer/journalist, assuming a stance of an "independent
liberal", as he preferred to be called, throughout his life fearlessly
fought for a more just and freer world.
Q&A - 20 minutes total
Session 7 16.45 - 17.45 Research Paper
Session II
Session Title: "The Political Dimensions
of Literary Journalism"
Moderator: Viviane Serfaty (Université de
Marne-la-Vallée, France)
1. Steve Guo (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong
Kong), Ye Lu (Fudan University, China), "Between the Lines:
Literary Reporting and the Margin of Legitimacy in China"
Literary reporting (baogao wenxue) is the Chinese variation of
reportage, the thematic characterization of literary journalism.
As a popular style of long form journalism, literary reporting
has a stand-alone position in the Chinese press, typically written
with its own style and evaluated in its own right. Perhaps more
true in China than elsewhere, major conjunctions of social transition
and policy shift all have their own defining masterpieces of literary
reporting. Respect for literary reporting owes much to what it
is, free in structure, vivid in presentation, both attention grabbing
and emotionally engaging. But the phenomenal status of literary
reporting in China has more to do with what it does. It appears
as though this way of story telling carries with it a pre-ordained
mission to define or break norms and to orient the public mind
toward or away from them. This study focuses on the dynamic relationship
between literary reporting and the larger social milieu. We seek
to identify and explain a common practice in literary reporting
where intellectuals use the tool of marginalized legitimacy to
advance their personal or collective agenda. Stylistic freedom
in writing and contradictions in state advocacies at the same
or different times (e.g., common good vs. individual achievement)
combine to offer unbound grounds for creative narratives, tactful
innuendos, and imaginative insinuations in literary reporting,
all of which border on the deviant, and yet none of which violating
professional codes, institutional norms, or party policies. We
intend to conduct a discourse analysis on two epoch-making exemplars
of literary reporting. Between Demons and Humans tells the fall
from grace of a corrupt business manager, whereas Big Nation Few
Citizens depicts a thorny court case. As social critiques, the
two stories were written by different people at different historical
junctures, each harboring its own hidden agenda, but revealing
very different intellectual pursuits. Both toe the party line,
the former relying on traditional morals, while the latter contemporary
appeal of legality.
2. Isabelle Meuret (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium),
"On the Campaign Trail: Five Characters in Search of Change"
From Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
'72 (2003) to Joan Didion's Political Fictions or Fixed Ideas:
America Since 9/11 (2003), literary journalists have always had
politics in their sights. A few months before the US presidential
elections, candidates are in the limelight; they feed the news,
strike chords and make memorable quotes. The audience is hooked,
waiting for new developments in this action-packed serial replete
with reversals and tearful moments. Campaign 2008 unfolds like
a reality TV show with the active participation of an audience
voting out unsuccessful candidates. My paper aims at reading the
narratives developing around these dramatis personae, with special
emphasis on the period starting when John Edwards and Rudy Giuliani
dropped out of the race. With chances narrowing down to five nominees,
tension rises, making this campaign one of the most fascinating
in history. To what extent are these political figures characterised?
How well are they playing their part? Does the term 'political
fictions' apply in this context where each character strives to
carve his/her destiny and that of a nation against a backdrop
of master narratives which overshadow their every move? This paper
purports to deconstruct the clichés and 'fixed ideas' revealed
in articles published in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone in the
period described above. Joan Didion once pointed to the dichotomies
arising between political leaders and citizens. By hammering in
the term 'change' in their speeches, today's nominees insist they
want to reconnect with their people and celebrate democracy. A
critical and thorough analysis of the press sample will help show
whether the narrativisation of the presidential race or, more
generally, the fictionalisation of politics is a force for the
better in understanding and altering reality.
3. Anthony Lake (Fatih University, Turkey), "E. M. Foster's
Wartime Journalism and Death of Liberal Humanist England"
E. M. Forster's wartime journalism is a detailed restatement of
the liberal humanist values that he had explored and advocated
in his six novels, published between 1905 and 1924. After A Passage
to India Forster wrote no more novels, but effectively developed
a second writing career as a critic and journalist, writing on
cultural and political matters. His various journalistic concerns
come together in his journalism occasioned by World War Two. The
proposed paper is concerned with the interactions of Forster's
journalism with his own earlier fictional writing, and the historical
and cultural contexts of totalitarianism and war. Forster's journalistic
essays and articles provide a far more concise and clear statement
of his liberal humanist creed than did the novels, though they
do so in a cultural and political climate in which the assertion
of a liberal humanist ideal had been far more problematic than
it had in the novels written and published before 1914. Thus,
in his wartime journalism, we see Forster working through old
concerns that he had been unable to resolve in his fiction, in
the new context of totalitarianism and war. The tragic paradox
of Forster's position, which the paper will explore in detail,
is that the war itself was the final undoing of the ideal that
he sought to present as a means to avoid war, and at the very
moment when Forster had found, in journalistic writing, the ideal
medium for the development of his liberal humanist vision.
Q&A - 15 minutes total
Session 8 18.00 - 19.00 Executive Committee
Meeting (if needed)
19.00 - ? Informal drinks and dinner
Friday, 16th May 2008
Breakfast 8.00 - 8.45
Scholar's Breakfast (per reservation)
Session 9 9.00 - 10.00
Panel II
Panel Title: "Teaching Literary Journalism:
As Literature"
Moderator: David Abrahamson (Northwestern University,
U.S.A.)
John Kenny (National University of Ireland - Galway,
Ireland)
Jenny McKay (University of Stirling, U.K.)
Norman Sims (University of Massachusetts - Amherst, U.S.A.)
Alice Trindade (Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Portugal)
Q&A - 15 minutes total
Session 10 10.15 - 11.15 Poster/Work-in-Progress
Session III
Session Title: "The Historical Origins in
Literary Journalism"
Moderator: Patsy Sims (Goucher College, U.S.A.)
1. David Abrahamson (Northwestern University, U.S.A.),
"Memento Vivere: Lessons"
If ever there was a project which could claim to be a work-in-progress,
this must certainly be it. I am in the process of starting work
on a book-length project which, I admit, seems almost impossible.
My goal (conceit?) is to attempt, on a frighteningly ambitious
scale, to thematically explicate the place of literary journalism
in the world of nonfiction letters. My hope is that the resulting
work will explore the sociocultural, economic, political, aesthetic
and academic currents which have shaped -- and will continue to
inform -- the genre's development. In addition, my objective will
be to try to locate literary journalism in the technological and
cultural transformations in which journalism finds itself today,
as well as to suggest its place in the possible realities of tomorrow.
The work I would be most grateful for an opportunity to present
-- for any discussion, comment and criticism it might provoke
-- is, in essence, the tentative thematic structure I have devised
for the book, along with other supporting materials. Moreover,
it might be worth adding that the underlying tenet (core assumption?)
of the project is my strong suspicion that there might very possibly
be value in the view that literary journalism can be both encountered
and understood, on a number of levels, as a memento vivere --
a reminder of life.
2. Maria Leonor Sousa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal),
"The Diffusion of British Culture Through Portuguese Periodicals"
Two PhD dissertations on Portuguese periodicals in the period
leading up to 1890 have recently been submitted for evaluation
and a project has been set up to enable research in this area
to be extended into the twentieth century. Due to the lengthy
time scale to be covered (up to 1974) it was decided to divide
the period into sections in accordance with important events,
such as the proclamation of the Republic (1910), the two World
Wars, and the Revolution of 1974. There is a degree of flexibility
which will allow the organization of the work to be modified as
required as the periods in question vary much in the quality and
content of available source materials. It is intended that the
project will develop as part of a broader and more ambitious undertaking
which provided the foundation upon which the Centro de Estudos
Anglo-Portugueses was originally created, the diffusion of British
Culture in Portugal as seen through translations, the accounts
of British travellers and diplomats in Portugal, drama, opera,
cinema and other cultural manifestations. Now the historical approach
which led to the division into periods has been decided upon,
the next step is a listing of the most significant periodicals
which are likely to produce the most valid results. This will
be carried out with recourse to works of reference and the National
Bibliographic database (PORBASE). It may prove necessary to opt
to exclude certain periodicals published outside the main urban
centres or those of an exclusively political nature. Any decision
of this kind cannot be taken a priori but only as the outcome
of close scrutiny of available resources. Two lines of research
have already been provisionally identified, one based in English
and Portuguese in Hong Kong and Macau and a second on American
periodicals.
3. Maria do Céu Marques (Universidade Aberta, Portugal),
"John dos Passos: A Chronicler of the Twentieth Century"
Since the end of the nineteenth century, people had realized the
importance of the media. All kinds of information, propagated
by newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and literary works, revolutionised
American way of thinking and contributed to the information of
the masses especially in cities. They reported events that took
place inside and outside the country. When the limits of journalism
did not allow more creative work, many journalists turned to fiction,
as happened to Whitman, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Willa Cather or
John Dos Passos. Dos Passos's work as journalist allowed him to
get involved with certain subjects that gave him other perspectives
on life. The possibility he had to travel and be in touch with
events that occurred in different places helped him to look at
people and things in a more attentive way. Journalism taught him
not to believe everything he was told but to see and judge by
himself. When Dos Passos wrote fiction, he did not forget the
power media and advertisements had on people's behaviour. He decided
to make use of their rhetoric in biographies and "newsreels" to
impress the reader and give him the opportunity to look around
at himself and others. He knew that the press affected, and has
been affected by the social issues of the time. Through his characters
Dos Passos depicts scenes of daily life in his works to prove
the importance papers have in telling people what is happening
in the world.
4. Marius-Adrian Hazaparu (University of Iasi, Romania), "Entertainment
Elements in the Romanian Literary Reportage of the Inter-War Period"
This kind of approach regarding the Romanian literary reportage
is due to my attempt to "attack" the still existing dispute on
the affiliation of the reportage one the one hand to literature,
and on the other, to journalism. The starting point is represented
by the language functions of the psychologist and philosopher
Karl Bühler, mostly the appeal function, phatic function in Roman
Jakobson's classification. The main idea is that the relevant
function in a written text is the one that owns classifying power
over the text itself. As all newspaper products, the reportage
must be in accord with the expression of phaticity. In the case
of the contemporary written press, obviously this is easily to
demonstrate, since the newspaper layout offers supplementary possibilities,
along with the so-called entertainment and infotainment elements,
all designed for the maintenance of the contact with the reader.
When talking about the literary reportage published in the Romanian
inter-war press, the temptation of the scholars is to incorporate
it in the literary genres, throwing a shadow on its possibilities
to distinguish itself as a journalistic genre. Consequently, the
search of its phaticity is of most importance for the establishment
on solid grounds of the literary reportage of the second decade
of the twentieth century. The case study will focus on the Filip
Brunea-Fox's reportages, the eloquent reporter of the mentioned
period. The novelty consists in changing the type of the analysis
from a literary stylistic towards a stylistic of communication.
Q&A - 20 minutes total
Session 11 11.30 - 12.30 Research Paper
Session III
Session Title: "Biographical Interpretations
of Literary Journalism"
Moderator: Norman Sims (University of Massachusetts
- Amherst, U.S.A.)
1. Ginger Carter Miller (Georgia College & State
University, U.S.A.), Randy Miller, (University of South Florida,
U.S.A.), "More than a Curious Footnote: The Literary Journalism
Odyssey of Ralph Ginzburg and Eros Magazine"
This research was designed to connect the literary journalism
aspirations of Ralph Ginzburg, who is known more for his pioneering
First Amendment battles in 1965 on the charge of pandering, This
research hopes to expose a rarely studied side of Ralph Ginzburg
- his contribution to the field of literary journalism as both
a writer and a publisher. Ginzburg worked as a writer, editor,
and publisher for more than 40 years. Across his body of work,
Ginzburg was concerned with realism, structure, voice, and in-depth
research as a means of accuracy - all qualities ascribed in the
1970s to the genre of writers called literary journalism. From
his first articles as a freelance magazine writer, to his time
as one of the "young Turks" at Esquire, the "mother ship" of literary
journalism, every literary experience was meaningful to Ginzburg
because it planted the seeds for his future magazine, Eros. His
publishing experience with The Helmsman Press, where he turned
a magazine article into a short but meaningful work of literary
journalism called An Unhurried View of Erotica, gave him the financial
means to produce the magazine of his dreams. This paper will first
establish the criteria for literary journalism using current scholarship,
then it will trace Ginzburg's career in order to classify him
within the genre. Future implications for additional research
on Ginzburg's publications will also be discussed.
2. Gonzalo Saavedra (Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile),
"Quote That Voice! Quotations and the Making of a Narrator
in Literary Nonfiction"
The article shows how the narrator can tell more than what the
literary and journalistic nonfiction orthodoxy dictates. By way
of narrating a source's speech, the narrator can report states
of consciousness-i.e., feelings, thoughts, perceptions-as it happens
in novels that have what is commonly known as omniscient narrators.
The result is an extensive paralepsis (the narrator tells more
that he/she is allowed to tell by the narrative situation) that
can be either legitimate or illegitimate. Although recent discussions
had considered the issue (mostly Gérard Genette and Dorrit Cohn),
this particular problem has not been studied thoroughly. The text
reviews the procedures that make legitimate those transgressions
or, as I call them, omniscient practices, attending mainly to
the ways of quoting (modes of indirect speech). Depending on how
a speech is reproduced (reconstructed), some effects can be achieved
in the voice of the nonfiction narrator up to the point that this
voice that tells true facts can be given powers that, in principle,
are reserved just for fiction narrators. In the same way, is it
possible to do some maneuvers with the narration time and achieve
similar results. In all cases, and if the realization of these
procedures is legitimate, the texts produced in this way are impressionistically
considered as "literary nonfiction." Every procedure is illustrated
by examples by journalists Gabriel García Márquez, Rick Bragg,
Jesús Duva, Patricia Verdugo and Carmen Hertz, among others.
Q&A - 15 minutes total
Lunch 12.30 - 14.15
Session 12 14.15 - 15.15 Poster/Work-in-Progress
Session IV
Session Title: "Types and Genres of Literary
Journalism"
a. Moderator: John Kenny (National University of
Ireland - Galway, Ireland)
1. Sharon Norris, Melanie McGrath (Roehampton University,
U.K.), "'Unreliable Memoirs?' The Rewards and Challenges
of Teaching Memoir in an Aacademic Context to Non-Specialists"
In January 2008, the Creative Writing team at Roehampton University,
London offered a new course in memoir. What distinguished this
course from others offered by the team was that it was targeted
not at students, but at members of staff. This paper considers
what lessons were learnt from the experience of teaching memoir
within an academic context, but to non-specialists (here defined
as academic, administrative and support staff with no previous
background in writing). Among the questions we pose are: how do
we account for the popularity of memoir in general; what were
the students' aims in taking this course; and what did they hope
to get out of it? We also pose more specific questions relating
to the teaching and learning of memoir to non-specialists. These
include: how does one decide on the syllabus for a memoir writing
course and what are the main issues? How does one teach such a
course in a situation a) where time is restricted (i.e. a 50 min
lunchtime slot) and b) where no prior knowledge of key writing
skills (e.g. researching and structuring material) may be presumed.
One further important issue we discuss is whether teaching style,
content and presentation for this class had to be altered, and
in what ways, to take account of the academic/non-academic breakdown
of group members. The paper contextualises these questions by
outlining why the course was set up, and it concludes by considering
whether the course and teaching model developed might be transferrable
to other contexts.
2. Joshua Roiland (Saint Louis University, U.S.A.), "Reclaiming
Authority: Salvador's Disillusion with Official Sources and Solutions"
There is a long tradition of scholarship exploring the political
consequences of professional conventions of print journalism.
These problematic conventions include, but are not limited to,
the demand for objectivity, the reliance on official sources,
the use of summary-lead paragraphs, the privileging of facts over
opinions, and the marginalization of storytelling. These conventions
reduce a reader's agency and ability to respond to the texts.
My paper proposes that literary journalism offers alternatives
to many of the political problems identified by conventional journalism
scholars. Journalism's contract with the public is never so necessary
or precarious as it is during war; consequently, I interrogate
Joan Didion's Salvador in order to test my hypothesis of literary
journalism. I argue that Didion's subjectivity, authority, and
narrativity-features present in most literary journalism-contribute
to a more emotionally resonant and politically effective picture
of the civil war in El Salvador. I compare Didion's account of
the civil war in El Salvador with articles from the New York Times,
the Washington Post, and Newsweek, as well as broadcasts from
CBS Evening News, in order to demonstrate how her (and the genre's)
stylistics improve upon conventional journalism. The significance
of this paper transcends Didion's work and speaks to a larger-and
largely unrecognized-feature of literary journalism: its political
significance. Literary journalism has existed nearly as long as
the conventional press, yet scholars have largely ignored a parallel
discussion of the political consequences of the genre's unique
blend of reporting and writing style, opting instead to treat
literary journalism as an artful response to the constraints of
conventional journalism. I am interested in demonstrating how
the aesthetics of the genre have the potential to enhance democratic
principles by establishing a more rational public sphere. There
is a lot of scholarship on journalism and the public sphere, but
few scholars make the inductive leap to literary journalism. My
paper will propose a political theory of literary journalism that
uses reader response theory to explain how the genre's subjectivity,
authority, and narrativity offer readers more potential than conventional
journalism to engage in fundamental democratic principles like
voting, assembly, and discourse. In his historiography of the
genre, John Hartsock revealed literary journalism's long democratic
tradition. A host of contemporary scholarship has recognized and
advocated for the continuance of the genre's populist subject
matter and style of presentation. The scholarship reveals that
literary journalists often choose to report on the everyday, and
present their findings in the similarly egalitarian style of realism.
Norman Sims is emblematic of the scholars who champion the populist
topics of the literary journalist. Sims believed literary journalists
broke free from what Walter Lippmann deemed a "managerial elite"
because "through their eyes we watch ordinary people in crucial
contexts." In connection with their attempts to write about ordinary
or marginalized subjects, literary journalism employs a style
of realism that is often absent in conventional journalism. Thomas
Connery continued the scholastic vein of championing the democratic
motivation behind literary journalism's realism by asserting that
it shares the same goal as the historical method, which is to
"capture people as they really are." Connery claimed, "Literary
journalism attempts to show readers life and human behavior, even
if what actually emerges is life's incomprehensibility and the
inexplicability of human behavior." Norman Sims has said that
the combination of egalitarian subject and realistic method changes
the way he encounters work: "Whether or not literary journalism
equips me for living differently than other forms of literature,
I read as if it might." These scholars all allude to literary
journalism's potential to engage citizens in various manifestations
of democracy, ranging from voting to demonstrating to discourse,
than conventional journalism. My paper will make those connections
and explanations explicit by explaining the politics of the genre's
aesthetics.
3. Maria João Ferreira (Universidade Técnica de
Lisboa, Portugal), "It's Closure Time in the Gardens of the
West: Politics of (In) Security and Risk. Politicization Discourse
Through the Lenses of Susan Sontag's Literary Journalism"
"It is closure time in the gardens of the west", said Susan Sontag
when describing north-American society one year after 9/11. "Closure"
is employed, in Sontag's narrative, as the feeling which best
translates societal responses to a world increasingly governed
through the political manipulation of fear and therefore of risk.
Risk is one of the concepts that has become recurring, especially
since 9/11, in political and academic imaginary. Discussed by
those who devise strategies to manage it, by those who see it
as a structural trait of world post-modern society or even by
those who regard it as a fundamental element in contemporary "politics
of insecurity", risk is transversal to several approaches throughout
the social sciences. The objective of my paper is to discuss post
9/11 securitisation discourse as depicted in the critical thought
of Susan Sontag. I relate Sontag's anti-securitisation perspectives
with her preview work on the politics of exclusion, namely through
the deepening of the 'tainted communities' concept. I try to explain
Sontag's literary project, connecting her thought on risk perception
in the security and health fields with Michel Foucault's work
on 'biopower' and 'governamentality security devices'. I conclude
by demonstrating the importance of literary journalism in exposing
the contingent and socially constructed nature of risk, contributing
to the deconstructing of risk politicisation strategies.
Q&A - 20 minutes total
Session 13 15.30 - 16.30 President's
Address and Annual Business Meeting/Election
IALJS Annual Business Meeting-Lisbon
Agenda
1. IALJS President's Address
2. Treasury Report
3. LJS status and CFP
4. Amendments to the Constitution or By-Laws (with vote)
5. Membership Issues (how to continue attracting more members
and increase dues)
6. Website: changes; minor improvements; creating the LJS website
7. IALJS Newsletter update
8. IALJS 4-Chicago
9. Future IALJS projects (ESSE 9 and the book currently under
consideration at U Mass)
10. New business
11. Farewell address
12. Nomination and elections
13. Installation of new officers and chairs
14. Adjournment
Party 16.45 - 18.00 Conference Reception
Dinner 19.00 - ? Conference
Banquet
Saturday, 17th May 2008
Session 14 9.00 - 10.00
Panel III
Session Title: "Short-Form Literary Journalism:
Testing the Boundaries"
Moderator: Tom Connery (University of St. Thomas,
U.S.A.)
John Hartsock (SUNY Cortland, U.S.A.)
Sam G. Riley (Virginia Tech University, U.S.A.)
Viviane Serfaty (Université Paris - Est, France)
Jenny McKay (University of Stirling, U.K.)
Q&A - 15 minutes total
Session 15 10.15 - 11.15 Research Paper
Session IV
Session Title: "Literary Journalism: Its
Sources and Outcomes"
Moderator: John Hartsock, (SUNY Cortland, U.S.A.)
1. Isabel Santos (Universidade Técnica de
Lisboa, Portugal), "South: Where Travel Meets Literary Journalism"
South (Sul in Portuguese) is a collection of articles written
over the years by Miguel Sousa Tavares, a very well-known controversial
Portuguese journalist and successful novelist, and published in
book form in 1998. In September 2007, the editors decided to present
the public with a surprising 75.000-copy new revised 10th edition,
which, for Portuguese standards, confers best-selling status to
the work in question. South is a series of travel accounts that
Sousa Tavares, an insatiable traveller to southern latitudes,
wrote and published in the Portuguese press. However, these are
not the accounts of a tourist going places for private purposes
or recreation. Sousa Tavares is the observer of different realities,
may they be in the South of his own country, in the exotic landscapes
of the Amazon or in the arid immensities of Africa. He is always
the reporter, the translator of places to the public. He is the
first to state that he always had a commission, a task to perform,
an objective to write about. And he is also the first to declare
that his journalistic intentions were never carried out because,
in the contact with the subject he was supposed to observe, he
always found something that led him to a different journalism,
a distinct way of reporting. He can never be the detached journalist,
he is the journalist on an immersion process that leads him to
the ultimate apprehension of his object of reporting: the subjective
knowledge of something. With this paper we aim at disclosing how
literary journalism is making its way in/through the contemporary
Portuguese press. And, for the first time, we are analysing one
of the most popular and known Portuguese journalists and stating
that his is a peculiar form of journalism because it is literary
journalism. Furthermore, we select, as corpus of our study, texts
that can both fall within the realm of travelogue and literary
journalism, those two hybrid forms that intersect one another
and whose boundaries fail to be clear and well-defined. Therefore,
we will be concentrating mainly on the article entitled "Alentejo:
On a Landscape of Ruins" in which the author writes about the
Alentejo, a southern province of Portugal. Travelling in the Alentejo,
Sousa Tavares sees a decaying land of abandoned farms, mines and
villages, the ruins of a part of the country neglected by central
administration. A corrosive article that exposes the literary
journalist's disenchantment with Portuguese politics and his hope
in the brighter days to come.
2. William Dow (Université de Valenciennes and the American
University of Paris, France), "Class Representation and the
Politics of Impersonality in James Agee's 'Saratoga' and 'Havana
Cruise'"
Agee's literary journalism contains the hope of trying to invent
a new transforming aesthetic practice in which, as Agee states
in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), "the reader is no less
centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell"
(Praise 28). Phyllis Frus argues that literary journalism, due
to its predominantly "non-fictional" form, is a kind of discourse
where "true and false" are more important "distinctions" than
in "literature" (9). This, though, I think, cannot be said of
Agee, especially because of his highly self-conscious style, which
blurs almost every distinction between literature and non-fiction,
his undermining of the dichotomy between "literature" and "mass
culture" (contravening the conventional belief that "literature
is thought of as the realm where, even when a work represents
the world, its truth or falsity is irrelevant" Frus 8-9), and
his conception of narrative "truth." As he argues in Famous Men,
"Journalism can within its own limits be 'good' or 'bad,' 'true'
or 'false,' but it is not in the nature of journalism even to
approach any less relative degree of truth" (206). Agee's plea
for a kind of journalism that would not "poison the public" (Praise
206) but would "perceive in full and…present immaculately what
was the case" (Fitzgerald 29) has significant ramifications for
his class representations in which a "reliable" and "percipient"
(participant-) observer "must not be ignored" (Ashdown 60). Above
all, in his literary journalism, Agee sees himself foremost as
a cultural and social critic. Thus while expediting his "great
claims" (Ashdown, Agee 197), he never abandons his point of view
and his subjects rarely speak for themselves. Agee's journalistic
assignments for Fortune, Time, and the Nation in the nineteen
thirties and forties included stories on the Tennessee Valley
Authority (a kind of conventional documentary counterpart to Famous
Men), cockfighting, industrial pollution, a war-damaged Europe,
the death of F.D.R., and the U.S. commercial orchid industry.
For my purposes, though, the most important pieces are "Saratoga"
(Fortune, 1935) and "Havana Cruise" (Fortune, 1937), neither of
which have received the critical attention they deserve. Preceding
the actual writing of Famous Men by less than a year, "Saratoga"
anticipates the Agee narrator of the Alabama experience: prescient
yet uncertain, observing himself as much as he observes others,
getting close to his subjects by giving us their world as a substitute
for themselves. "Havana Cruise," published a year after Agee's
most famous work, extends many of the techniques of Famous Men,
revealing, most notably, his subjects through the portrayal of
objects while employing strategies of address that complicate
the relationship between representation and real experience. Yet
while trying to discover another form of class knowledge-this
time that of the "middle-class," Agee, inversing his intention
in Famous Men, de-sacralizes his subjects, and, in so doing, condemns
them for their non-defiance. Both articles attempt to portray
people as something more than sociological entities and to discover
some of the basic patterns of 1930s American culture.
3. Robert Alexander (Brock University, Canada), "Fabricators
Atone: Michael Finkel's True Story and the Literary Journalism
of Repair"
In this paper, I examine the uncomfortable relationship between
literary journalism and journalistic fabrication. In particular,
I am interested in the possibility that the emphasis on objectivity
in modern journalism alienates the journalist's subjectivity in
a manner which gives rise not only to literary journalism, as
John C. Hartsock has argued, but also, in some very specific cases,
to fabricated news. In making this argument, I offer no excuses
for the fabricators. I am interested, rather in the excuses the
fabricators make for themselves and particularly the way those
excuses , in order to restore the damaged reputations of their
writers, draw on the techniques of literary journalism. I will
discuss two such works: briefly, Stephen Glass's The Fabulist
(2003) and, at greater length, Michael Finkel's True Story (2005).
In both, the authors write in genres which permit them to express
the subjectivity previously denied to them as journalists. (Glass's
book is a novel, Finkel's a work of literary journalism.) Curiously,
however, in both works, that repressed subjectivity manifests
itself in characters which function as doubles of the authors.
In Glass's text, for example, this doubling is evident in the
author's third-person account of the follies of his protagonist
"Stephen Glass." More bizarre still, though, is the explicit identification
which emerges in True Story between former New York Times Magazine
writer (and exposed fabricator) Finkel and his book's subject,
a man who, having murdered his wife and three children, fled to
Mexico where he assumed Finkel's identity. Such doubles function,
I will argue, to differentiate the fabricator's past from present
selves. They also, however, imply a critique of conventional journalism
not unlike what we find in some works of literary journalism for,
in the interplay of these authors and their dark doubles, one
may discern an attempt to atone, that is, in the most etymologically
precise meaning of the term, to become "at one" with themselves,
repairing the effects of a subjectivity riven by the alienating
effects of journalistic objectivity.
Q&A - 15 minutes total
Session 16 11.30 - 12.30 Closing Convocation
David Abrahamson (Northwestern University, U.S.A.)
Lunch 12.30 - 14.15
Tour 14.15 - 17.15 Lisbon
Tour
Farewell 19.00 - ? Informal
drinks and dinner
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