Bachelor
2020/2021
A History of the American New Journalism
Type:
Compulsory course (Philology)
Area of studies:
Philology
Delivered by:
School of Philological Studies
Where:
Faculty of Humanities
When:
4 year, 2, 3 module
Mode of studies:
offline
Instructors:
Dmitry Kharitonov
Language:
English
ECTS credits:
3
Contact hours:
28
Course Syllabus
Abstract
American New Journalism of the 1960s—1970s and its precursor, American literary journalism that first introduced the “narration of news” aimed both at entertaining and informing the reader in the 1890s, have had a great impact on American (and global) journalism (and literature). There are reasons to consider New Journalism the most influential and critically acclaimed form of literary journalism, one that seems to have fulfilled literary journalism’s apparent “agenda,” effectively merging nonfiction writing with creative writing, and to have prompted American scholars into studying literary journalism in the first place. Its history is the subject of this course.
Learning Objectives
- This course is supposed to introduce students to New Journalism as a form of literary journalism and as a significant part of American literature. Today it is impossible to imagine American cultural—and social—landscape unchanged by New Journalism; this course will show how this impossibility became possible.
Expected Learning Outcomes
- To locate New Journalism within American literary, journalistic, and social history
- To trace New Journalism of the 1960s back to the XIXth century, when literary journalism became apparent as a phenomenon
- To understand what ostensibly allows journalism to be appreciated as literature
Course Contents
- American society and culture: 1945—1964
- Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism (1973): an image in a context. Literature, journalism, and politics of the 1960s. A theory of New Journalism. Literary journalism: 1890s—1960s. New Journalism: 1965—1973. Practice and reception. The New Yorker, Esquire, Rolling Stone, New York.
- 5. Exemplary texts: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965), Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels (1966), John Sack’s M (1966), Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968), Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Hunter S. Thompson’s Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved (1970)
