The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative

Early in the twentieth century, journalism and fiction suffered a forced separation as a result of two coinciding trends: a popular tendency to treat literature as an elevated, aesthetic category and the emergence of objective narrative in journalism. The effect of these two forces was to distance the subject of the narrative from its object, an estrangement later challenged by the writing of New Journalists and nonfiction novelists. In her book Frus recovers and renegotiates the process of writerly creation, and proves that, ultimately, the observer is implicated in the means of observation.