EN 430.01 Literature and Journalism in America (Fall 2011-2012: 3)
This is an upper-division elective that examines the development of mainstream
and alternative American journalism over the last one hundred years, with
a special focus on the late 20th century. We will examine the border areas
and conflicts between American nonfiction and news reporting in four areas:
reporting on crime, the underclass, and transnational urban spaces; war
and foreign correspondence; the New (and newer) journalism; and memoir.
Our subject will be the interdependence of narrative forms with the social
conditions they address. Although we will acquaint ourselves with mainstream
journalistic notions like "the story" or "objectivity"--and pay close attention
to how writers construct news narratives--this is decidedly not a practical
course in how to be a journalist. Rather, we'll be working between and across
journalism understood as both a social practice (involving relationships
between journalists and their subjects, strategies of story-gathering, and
positioning) and as a textual matter (through which writers engage in social
or political allegory, attempt ethnographies of cultural customs, reconstruct
memory, map geographies both physical and cognitive). This course is open
to non-majors, but students should be experienced readers of narrative ready
to tackle theoretical essays alongside these journalistic texts. Recommended
for American Studies minors.
Christopher Wilson
Last Updated: 24-JAN-11