2014 - Fall

Journalism as Literature: Learning from the Best to be the Best

Course Number: JOUR-UA 504, section 001

Day & Time: Tuesday 11:00am-1:30pm

Location: 20 Cooper Square, room 654

Learning from The Best To Be The Best is a survey of some of the most entertaining and well-written literary journalism of the last two centuries. We will read these articles and book excerpts carefully – “deep reading,” it is called – to discover how good writers take basic journalism and enliven it with literary technique. We want to catalog as much of that technique and structure as we can so that we can “steal it,” appropriate the devices for our own work. Students will work in teams; each week a team will “present” the readings and incite a discussion with the rest of the class. There will be some three to five formal academic papers in which students will be asked to demonstrate their understanding of the material, and there will be a number of “creative” assignments as well. The main text for the course is an excellent anthology of non-fiction: The Art of Fact by Kerrane and Yagoda.