Note de Lecture: Literature and Journalism

Canada Mark (ed.), Literature and journalism: inspirations, intersections, and inventions from Ben Franklin to Stephen Colbert, First edition., New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

INTRODUCTION

Journalism reports facts in prescribed formats for mass audiences, while literature explores truth in variety of artistic ways for selected readers.

Stephen Crane in 1897 : Stephen Crane’s Own Story, The Open Boat are two different approaches of the same event.

Colonial coexistence:

J. Campbell launched the Boston News-Letter in 1704, the first American newspaper.

Lennard Davis: no real distinction between what we would call fact and fiction.

Doug Underwood: the line between the real and the imagines was very much blurred.

Antebellum rivalry

The New York Sun, 1833, by Benjamin Day, was the first penny journal.

From 1835, James Gordon Bennett reached 20 000 readers with his Herald.

Literature remained but the main attraction was the news, as facts could be as much entertaining as fiction.

The appeal of literature didn’t decrease: the New York Sun’s sensational Moon Hoax, in the 1830, claimed to be a report on the existence of winged creatures on the Moon.

H. D. Thoreau, in Slavery in Massachusetts, insists on the omnipresence and the influence of the newspaper, carried anytime and everywhere by every man in his pocket, comparing it to the Bible.

Major authors of the first half of the 19th century aka American Renaissance, who produced accounts of reality, had to compete with newspapers.

Responses varied:

Douglass learnt to read thanks to William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and created the North Star. Like Whitman, he used his paper to argue in favor of political reform.

Thoreau, Stowe and Harding Davis denounced the lack of coverage concerning slavery and popular classes.

Emerson, Cooper and Poe mocked whether the futility of the press or the incompetence of journalists.

F. Douglass: Our Paper and its Prospects: Uselessness and triviality of the news. He argued for reporting on deeper and more important truth.

Alternative writings: news of their own, news of natural and spiritual worlds, investigative fictions, …

Journalism moved from an intimate companion of literature to an uppity younger sibling.  

Postbellum Apprenticeships

Civil War triggered a need for news and facts.

Bennett’s Herald reached 100 000 readers in 1861, Hearst’s New York Journal and Pulitzer’s New York World papers over a million by the end of the century.

No longer than a 4-page miscellany of news and anecdotes before the War, it became a 16-24, even 72-page index of what was happening in the USA and in the world.

The media moguls edited entertainment: cartoons, gossips, crime, sex, scandals, news, reports, … Richard Outcault’s cartoon Yellow Kid gave its name to this Press.