"Literary Journalism and the Canon"

ESSE 9 Seminar
Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
22-26 August 2008

IALJS was represented at their Ninth International Conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE)* at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, August 22-26, 2008. The seminar, entitled "Literary Journalism and the Canon," responded to the following topic:

While literary journalism has generally been considered an American phenomenon, whose writers include Capote, Mailer, Wolfe, Agee, and Didion, today it is practiced and studied world-wide. And as journalists look more and more to literary devices to tell their stories, and fiction writers to immersion reporting to lend a phenomenal reality to their narratives, scholars of literary journalism have concerted their efforts to define the genre's emerging academic discipline. One immediate issue has surfaced: how will the classic examples of literary journalism over the last century or more be regarded within a given nation's growing literary canon? This seminar will examine to what extent literary journalists past and present-from the U.S. and the U.K., but also from Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa-have contributed to palliating the quarrel of fact versus fiction and have (re)shaped our notion of what constitutes a national "literature".

The Canon Wars of the 1980s in America, sparked in a great part by the multicultural push and conservative backlashes of books like Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy (both New York Times best-sellers) had a strong impact on not just how and whom we teach at university but, and perhaps more importantly, what we define as a curriculum worthy of a degree in the humanities. American and British literary canons both underwent renovation in terms of who would be read and who would be shelved. We are still feeling the consequences of these canon wars today, with as many against its results as there are in favor of it. Women and minorities writers have found inclusion, while some traditional (i.e., white male) canonized writers have fallen out of favor.

The consequences of the canon wars should not be diminished, not only in terms of who gets space in, say, the Norton Anthology of American Literature, but also in terms of what values we hope to instill in our children. This session, "Literary Journalism and the Canon," is in one way a revisiting of the canon wars with potential new answers as well as new problems. As literary journalism (which we define here as "journalism as literature" and not "journalism about literature") becomes more and more recognized as a legitimate literary genre and cultural phenomenon, we are here to ask ourselves what, if anything, literary journalism can do to raise our cultural awareness and our appreciation of aesthetics. Some questions we will raise today are:

1. Is there room for literary journalism in the literary canon of a given nation, along side it recognized "great" authors.

2. Should there be a canon of journalism in which literary journalists could be included?

3. Among those examples of literary journalism already produced, which would we include in a canon, if we felt the need to in the first place?

4. How can literary journalism raise our awareness of a nation's concerns with the teachings of its history and cultural values, given that the genre lies somewhere between the aesthetic and the historical representations of a people and a national identity?

5. What would be deemed acceptable as good, hard-nosed journalism by the journalism community and literature qua art by the literary journalism/English literature communities? What necessary qualities would have to apply?

As journalists look more and more to literary devices to tell their stories, and fiction writers to immersion reporting to lend a phenomenal reality to their narratives, scholars of literary journalism have concerted their efforts to define the genre's emerging academic discipline. One immediate issue has surfaced: how will the classic examples of literary journalism over the last century or more be regarded within a given nation's growing literary canon? This seminar will examine to what extent literary journalists past and present-from the U.S. and the U.K., but also from Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa-have contributed to palliating the quarrel of fact versus fiction and have (re)shaped our notion of what constitutes a national "literature."

The Seminar Program

Seminar 32, Session 1
Norman Sims (University of Massachusetts Amherst, U.S.A.), "History and the Literary Journalism 'Canon'"

Seminar 32, Session 2
John C. Hartsock (SUNY-Cortland, U.S.A.), "Literary Journalism: Transnational Influencings"

Seminar 32, Session 3
Bill Reynolds (Ryerson University, Canada), "The Origin of Canadian Literary Journalism: Clues, Signposts, Evidence"

Seminar 32, Session 4
Isabelle Meuret (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium), "From Political Fictions to Fixed Ideas: Joan Didion's Unhidden Agenda"

Seminar 32, Session 5
Cholivatou Anastasia (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), "Examples of Literary Journalism in The Greek Press"

Seminar 32, Session 6
Viviane Serfaty (Université Paris-Est Marne la Vallée), "War Blogs as Literary Journalism"

Some Photos of the Seminar and of Town and University of Aarhus

*For more information about the conference or the CFP, visit the ESSE 9 website at http://www.esse2008.dk/cfp_seminars.html/ (see seminar S. 32). You might also be interested in two other seminars proposed: S. 10 "Research and the Literary Periodical: Theory and Methodology" and S. 36 "American Little Magazines and Innovative Voices on Language and the Self".