2017 - Spring

Journalism as Literature

Course Number: JOUR-GA 1023.002

Day & Time: Tuesday, 1:00pm-4:00pm

Instructor: Salman Rushdie

One of the most interesting developments of the past half-century or so has been the rise of a breed of journalists-in-novelists’-clothing who use the techniques of literature to tell true stories. But is blurring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction always a good thing? Does it make several of the most famous works of this type unreliable? We will look at some of the key texts of this new, or newish, form, from Tom Wolfe and George Plimpton by way of Joan Didion and Ryszard Kapuscinski to Larissa MacFarquhar and the 2015 Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich.