Journalistic Element In The Veins Of American Literature

The end of the Civil War ushered in a very important transitional period for theAmerican society. The advance of social structure, economy and technology,together with the boom of population, gave further rise to the penny pressnewspapers of the East Coast and the more traditional newspapers of the West Coast.As a result, the production of news became a business in real terms and journalismtook off. Reporters, usually young people with literary ambitions, were employed inlarge numbers. They went out onto the streets to seek out news and newspapersbecame a stage where they could make their voices heard. In the1990s, there weretwo journalistic models that co-existed, namely, the information model and storymodel. Mirroring the “New Journalism” put forward by Matthew Arnold, the storymodel revised and revived the literary genre of novel. To attract readers of all sortsand boost circulation, newspapers started to focus on novels about American people,American themes and American problems.At the same time, the rise of “Realism” and “Pragmatism” inspired writers topursue truth and respect experience. Novelists influenced by Realism, Naturalismand sociology started to account their societies, lives and ideals in the manner of ajournalist. Such inclination led to comments such as they (novelists) are similar tojournalists and very different from philosophers”. A literary scholar observed thatRealism, for writers, meant “to use familiar American dialects to capture special anddirect American realities”,[1]which in fact constituted the daily work of newspapers.Under such a cultural context, a previous work experience at journalism for reporter-novelists, such as Crane, Dreiser and Hemingway, seems to be a “training”period before a literary career. Gathering and sorting out news materials with adeadline that would cater to the taste of readers shaped their outlook on the worldand art. They learnt to draw upon stories and affairs from the penny press papers andblend them into their writing to entertain readers. They also developed their ownunique language styles in result of the rigorous training as a journalist. Theirjournalist background not only explains in essence their unique choice of theme,language style and writing skills, but also portrays the development contour of the“Americanness”(national characteristics) of American literature.Since1980s, a number of works were published on the historical bond betweenAmerican literature and journalism. Their research approaches could be roughly putinto three categories: discussing from the perspective of cultural criticism theinfluence of Newspaper Syndicate on literary realism; exploring from theperspective of literary criticism by close reading the influence of a writer’sjournalistic work experience on the narratology and stylistics of his/her later works,such as themes, language styles and source materials; studying generic boundariesby putting forward terms of “ambiguity” and “overlapping”. In China,comprehensive research in this domain lags behinds with little research achievementand no monograph. Therefore, by overall description and close reading, thisdissertation intends to re-study the works of those writers, re-explore thecontributions of journalistic work experience to their creation of fact-fiction texts,and re-examine “the journalist traditions from Mark Twain to Michael Herr”. Byconducting such a systematic and comprehensive study, this dissertation hopes todraw wider attention from fellow researchers to this thesis and identify another anglefor the study of American literature and journalism research.Chapter I is an introduction that spells out definitions, explains the culturalcontext in terms of urbanization, Realism and mass culture, further illustrates thebasis of the research by doing a literature review and presents the study approachand value. Chapter II to Chapter IV focus on three representative reporter-novelistsrecognized in relative researches, namely, Crane, Dreiser and Hemingway. Their theme selection methods, narrative styles and language techniques will be analyzedand expounded systematically. Furthermore, their respective characteristics willalso be compared and observed.Comparison and analysis in the dissertation led to a generally anticipatedoutcome. Their journalistic background not only played a significant role in shapingtheir narrative styles but also proved to be beneficial when adapting social sourcematerials to literary use. They borrowed lots of news stories to serve their literarycreation. When put into a larger context, these “unfeeling” news stories wereexploited at length to depict the feelings of the characters. Themes of the time werealso fused into American novels to shed a new light on American readers tounderstand the reality. In this way, the writers fulfilled their social responsibility andbring real meaning to their works. In the1960s, fictional journalists came into beingdue to discontent with just accounting the facts and they challenged the definition ofliterary genre. This dissertation believes that the intermingling of factual andfictional texts makes the demarcation between these two genres the source of doubts.It is time that we re-balanced and re-demarcated their positions.