MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Can journalism be avant-garde? This question arises from the body of work produced by the New Journalists, whose leading figures include Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer. The agitation of mainstream journalistic practice undertaken by each of the writers above was spurred, in part, by the questioning of a foundational journalistic practice: objectivity. The authority of fact and its capacity to represent the human condition was fundamentally challenged by the New Journalists. This challenge to objectivity drove an experimentation with journalistic form that produced a deeply innovative body of work, but this experimentation has not been adequately understood in the field of literary study. In order to do understand it, I aim to place the history of the New Journalism, specifically its innovations with journalistic form, within a broader history of avant-garde art. Indeed, the challenges to objectivity posed by the New Journalists parallels the challenges to representation posed by avant-garde artists from Masaccio to Cezanne. In other words, questioning the powers of representation underscores the changes one can see on a formal level throughout the history of painting and throughout the body of work produced by the New Journalists. My paper situates the challenges to journalistic form undertaken by the New Journalists within a broader history of artistic experimentation and demonstrates that the significance of these experimentations with form exceeds the fields in which they occur. These arguments will then provide a framework for understanding not only the formal innovations of a journalistic avant-garde but also the significance of these innovations for our thinking about the broader role and responsibility of the reporter.