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23 Chapter 1 Literary Reportage The “Other” Literary Journalism John C. HaRtsoCk Given the similaRities in terms, it would be easy to assume that “literary reportage” and “literary journalism” are one and the same genre. But consider the following: journalists Svetlana Alexievich and Anna Politkovskaya , who derive from the same Soviet and post-Soviet cultural milieu, have both been described as writers of “literary reportage” and its variant “reportage literature.” Yet they pose a riddle in genre studies because as journalists, they have produced work that is strikingly different, as even a cursory examination will reveal. Alexievich’s work is one in which the narrative and descriptive modalities dominate in what has been characterized as a “narra-descriptive journalism” more in keeping with the American tradition of literary journalism .1 Indeed, one anthology has firmly placed Alexievich as an author of literary journalism.2 Politkovskaya’s work, by contrast, is clearly one in which a discursiveness—expository and argumentative in nature—dominates. How, then, can both journalists be described as writers of literary reportage but only one be characterized as a writer of literary journalism? My purpose is to explore the origins of the literary reportage tradition in which both writers have worked in an effort to account for those differences. Alexievich and Politkovskaya, I would suggest, have engaged in a genre that is, to be sure, reflective of their native Russian tradition, but a genre that is also very much a cosmopolitan one and transcends national boundaries. What ultimately emerges is that “literary reportage” of European origin is a much more “elastic” form than American literary journalism. Such an examination is necessary if the comparative study of journalistic forms claiming to reflect the aesthetics of experience is to mature, a study that is long overdue.3 This is especially the case because literary reportage is little recognized and understood in the United States, but is or has been extant elsewhere not only as a national expression but as a transnational one as well. The result of such an examination, I hope, is that we will be able to develop 24 John C. HaRtsoCk a more nuanced understanding of the overlapping traditions and concerns of the two widely acknowledged generic characterizations. Defining “Literary Reportage” and “Literary Journalism” in an International Context “Literary reportage,” or “reportage literature,” depending on which of the terms serves as the modifier, is a problematic terminology from the outset. One reason is that at times the noun “reportage” alone has been applied for the whole, which raises issues of instability, given a standard American English dictionary definition of “reportage” as “the act or process of reporting news.”4 Definitions of reportage of the “literary” kind discussed here, whether the term stands alone for the whole or serves as the modified or the modifier, can bear distinct similarities to that of literary journalism in the United States. Probably the most durable definition of literary journalism was articulated by the American practitioner of the form Tom Wolfe, when he defined it as a “journalism that would read like a novel,” or, elsewhere, like a “short story.”5 In concert with Wolfe, the Portuguese writer and journalist Pedro Rosa Mendes notes, “Reportage literature is an engagement with reality with a novelist ’s eye but with a journalist’s discipline.”6 The British publication Granta, for the last thirty years or so a mainstay of the genre as “literary journalism” and as “reportage” of the literary kind, has provided the following definition: “The art and craft of reportage—journalism marked by vivid description, a novelist’s eye to form, and eyewitness reporting that reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know.”7 Should there be any doubt, some scholars have unambiguously equated literary journalism and literary reportage as the same thing. Rudolph G. Wagner , the German scholar of the Chinese version, observed in his 1992 study that “literary reportage” is “now called ‘new journalism,’”8 the latter referring to the movement of the 1960s involving the work of Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and Truman Capote, among others, that today we can see as one chapter in the long history of a narrative literary journalism. Peter Monteath takes a similar position in his 1990 study of the aesthetics of reportage on the subject of the Spanish civil war.9 But there are still other characterizations of literary reportage that push at such boundaries and hint at the difficulties of defining the reportage version . Alexievich...

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