English 2783
The Art of Fact: Contemporary Literary Journalism
Prompt # 19
25 November 2013

Getting very near the end

What we learn about literary journalism by browsing, part 2

There's been another fair bit of reporting and responding on the "finding literary nonfiction" forum. I hope everybody has had a chance to read everything; I want again to spend much of the time we have together tonight discussing people's different experiences. I'm expecting people will have some things to say about the way their finding the article gives them some ideas about the status of such articles in the world, about what characteristics of the article made them comfortable -- and uncomfortable -- with the ideas about literary journalism we've been discussing, and about the context in which they found the article.

Time marches on

I said last time,
I'm also going to be asking everyone to be doing some more reading about literary journalism, against the background of what you've come to know about it so far. More on that next week; in the meantime, have a look back at the postings in the bibliography wiki and the list of relevant texts.
When I said that I was under the erroneous assumption that we had one more meeting than we actually do. I had hoped to do that for one week and then ask people, for the last week, to find a particular piece by any of the literary journalists who are, by consensus, the important ones, and read it and place it in the context of what you know now about the form, its practitioners, the contexts they work in, and the ways they structure their work.

Next week, however, will be our last week to meet face to face (I had thought we were scheduled to meet December 9, but that is in fact our scheduled examination period).

What I want to achieve over the next week (or two) is a chance for those who have been consistently engaged in the work of this course to get some closure. This normally would involve some work with texts by scholars, critics, or historians about literary journalism (the sort of thing we used a few weeks ago, starting with this list of texts and the working bibliography), and then, in that context, allowing everybody to choose one central practitioner and take a sustained look at one piece and its context. In each case, of course, what I would hope we'd get was a public report from each person about this, so that as a preparation for a final learning reflection everyone would be able to use the work of others along with her own to create a final synthesis of her learning. We don't have time to do both.

I propose that we discuss what might be done before we adjourn tonight, and I'll make a final decision and create a prompt for next week on the basis of that discussion.

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