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134 Chapter 8 Literary Journalism in Spain Past, Present (and Future?) Sonia PaRRatt A Casual look at Spanish newspapers and magazines today is enough to give a general impression of how important literary journalism is to the print media in that country. To be sure, literary and journalistic activities have shared a long and complex history, although many years had to pass before that relationship was considered as an object of analysis. In Spain in particular, the situation is not much different. Although the origins of that journalism versus literature debate there can be traced back more than a century and a half, how the relationship between journalism and literature began in Spain and why it developed the way it did over time remain essentially unexamined in the secondary literature. This essay aims to correct that oversight. Evolution of the Relationship between Literature and Journalism in Spain Journalist José Acosta Montoro claims 1845 to be the year when literary journalism was first publicly acknowledged in Spain. When Joaquín Rodríguez Pacheco delivered his induction speech into the Real Academia Española, he defended the literary rights of journalism as an “independent genre.”1 Later, during the second half of the nineteenth century, references to journalism began circulating in Spanish textbooks on literature, which spoke about the existence of diverse trends for the classification of journalism. Ramon Salaverr ía describes these trends as having represented people who 1. considered journalism a literary genre closely linked to political life; 2. defined journalism as a didactic literary manifestation; and 3. declared themselves incapable of placing journalism in any known literary or oratorical genre.2 Literary Journalism in Spain: Past, Present (and Future?) 135 The conclusion Salaverría drew from this debate is that the first monographic textbooks about journalism were published as a result of the fact that the rules of writing for newspaper reporters in the nineteenth century were outlined by literature teachers. From a scholastic point of view, then, the main topics on news writing in Spain had their beginning in academic literature books. From a practitioner’s perspective, however, a review of history shows that in the early stages of its development in Spain, journalism was for the most part considered only as literature. This was the case because straight news, the bulk of the information that dailies provide nowadays, occupied only a small portion of space in the newspapers. Most of a paper’s content was devoted to the publication of essays, poems, and popular writings. This, of course, was not unique to Spain. British scholar Jean K. Chalaby describes how the early Anglo-American press and the French press both contained examples of literary journalism in their pages but differed on what “literary” actually meant. In the AngloAmerican context, the press soon grew independent of literature because literary writers were incapable of imposing their values and rules on journalists. At the end of the nineteenth century, the few novelists and poets who did publish work in newspapers were literary reviewers who very rarely departed from this kind of writing. In fact, one significant British novelist tempted by a journalistic career was Charles Dickens, who became the publisher of the Daily News in 1846 but left this job three weeks later.3 In France, however, literary figures and celebrities were traditionally very close to journalism and occupied important positions in the press until after 1870. Although being a successful journalist was not enough to provide social recognition, journalism was seen by many young people as a first step toward a political career. The presence of the literary elite in the French press also explains the importance that literary values had for French journalists. Proof of this lies in the fact that admittance into the Académie française was considered to be the greatest honor for a French journalist, and the few who were chosen always signed their articles with mention of the French Academy.4 For these reasons, the distinctions in France between a journalist and a literary figure in the nineteenth century were essentially unidirectional; that is, a poet or a novelist could be a journalist, but a journalist was rarely thought of as an author of more noble literary genres. Perhaps because of this, the Dictionnaire des professions (1842) did not even list journalism as a profession. One’s literary status alone, Jane Chapman explains, was sufficient “to call oneself a journalist in order to collaborate in the publication of a newspaper; indeed, there was...

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