Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: True Stories
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: What Isn't Literature
- 1 Writing After the Fact: Crane, Journalism, and Fiction
- 2 “News That Stays”: Hemingway, Journalism, and Objectivity in Fiction
- 3 News That Fits: The Construction of Journalistic Objectivity
- 4 Other American New Journalisms: 1960s New Journalism as “Other”
- 5 The “Incredibility of Reality” and the Ideology of Form
- 6 Freud and Our “Wolfe Man”: The Right Stuff and the Concept of Belatedness
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
3 - News That Fits: The Construction of Journalistic Objectivity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: True Stories
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: What Isn't Literature
- 1 Writing After the Fact: Crane, Journalism, and Fiction
- 2 “News That Stays”: Hemingway, Journalism, and Objectivity in Fiction
- 3 News That Fits: The Construction of Journalistic Objectivity
- 4 Other American New Journalisms: 1960s New Journalism as “Other”
- 5 The “Incredibility of Reality” and the Ideology of Form
- 6 Freud and Our “Wolfe Man”: The Right Stuff and the Concept of Belatedness
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
[Y]ou could only guess about reporters, they never wrote about themselves, they were just these bodiless words of witness composing for you the sights you would see and the opinions you would have without giving themselves away, like magicians whose tricks were words.
– E. L. Doctorow, Billy BathgateFiction in the early twentieth century (when U.S. journalist-novelists were beginning to distinguish their work in fiction and journalism as qualitatively different) was characterized by a style of purity and simplicity, achieving these effects through omission and indirection. Because of these attributes and their effect, this style has been called behaviorist and objective; although we associate these characteristics with objective journalism, they are not features of Hemingway's journalism, in the early twenties or later.
When Hemingway used journalistic material in works published as fiction, he omitted signs of its writing and much of its context and explanation. As in revising the refugee chapter from Asia Minor, he removed extraneous characters and narrowed the temporal focus to a single period. Instead of reporting the consequences of events or explaining them, he presented scenes dramatically, often concentrating on a few details that then had to bear the weight of meaning, much as an objective correlative does. In one example after another, we see him transforming news stories into fictional vignettes by simplifying, omitting details, and making formal patterns out of chaotic or random events.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative , pp. 90 - 119Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994