Book Review: Literary Journalism Across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences, edited by John S. Bak and Bill Reynolds

Abstract

Literary Journalism Across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences. John S. Bak and Bill Reynolds, eds. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. 320 pp. $28.95 pbk.Journalism training in Western education systems has long focused on skills such as fact finding and writing. Moreover, scant space in newspapers has forced journalists to be economical with the number of words they use, so much so that Jenny McKay, writing about reportage in the United Kingdom in Literary Journalism Across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences, edited by John S. Bak and Bill Reynolds, comments that none of her journalism professors ever mentioned a connection between journalism and literature. This is probably true of most journalism instructors in general, unless they were teaching a course in literary journalism. Hence, it is not surprising that literary journalism is more of a specialized area of study rather than a part of a regular reporting class.This book-essays that place literary journalism in an international context- provides rich information about the history, traditions, and practices of literary journalism around the world. Yet the picture that emerges at the end is that the intersection of journalism and literature remains unclear, and becomes foggier in an international context. Take a few of the bewildering variety of definitions of literary journalism: creative nonfiction, literary reportage, narra-descriptive journalism, narrative journalism, and New Journalism-where fact intersects with fictional styles, and where the and subjective get blurry.Given that the origin and purpose of literary journalism vary from country to country, based on contextual factors such as the social, political, and economic climate, it is not surprising that this genre has taken different shapes and forms. For example, Bill Reynolds, who teaches at Ryerson University in Toronto, writes that in Canada, seven young literary journalists have formed a group known as FCC (earlier the initials stood for False Creek Coalition, later the Foreign Correspondents Club, and now the acronym itself). These journalists travel the world and narrate their experiences in a subjective manner in the larger context of the world. For their part, Clazina Dingemanse and Rutger De Graaf trace the roots of Dutch literary journalism to literary pamphleteering that used innovative and imaginative ways of conveying information such as dialogues and dream stories and explain how the newspapers took on some of their literary tones.The book is divided into three parts: toward a theory of international literary journalism, journalistic traditions, and transnational influences. In the introduction, Bak-who teaches American literature at Nancy Universite in France-traces the origin of literary journalism to the end of the nineteenth century. This genre of journalism survived even though after World War I it was believed that journalism had to be objective or polemical, he writes. …