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Jacque Derrida

Anyone around here ever stuck their nose into the realm of Literary Theory? Y’know, the crazy place that Sigmund Freud emerges from, or Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Stephen Greenblatt? Even Karl Marx, damned communist… Well, I have. At first it seemed like only a place that really intelligent people with cardigans and thick rimmed glasses decided to venture, and its easy to see why, but theory is something that I think has solidified the legitimacy of my pursuance of an English degree, it kind of separates it from the fact that I want to go to teacher’s college, it’s something that really makes sense to me.

Stephen Greenblatt

Literary theory has sort of placed itself in a void created by the lack of recent philosophical and sociological endeavors of the cultural sphere. It has taken the seeming failure and stagnation of philosophy and has risen up to work to find connections between many disciplinary practices that seek to allow us to understand and contextualize ideas and thought within the cultural and literary umbrella. Its pretty interesting stuff, as it’s used as a framework to navigate and map out areas of modern art, music, literature and almost any other form of genre or media in ways that provide new and better understandings of their significance. Theory pursues the creation of a realm of critical understanding and a way of looking at text that focuses strands of philosophical argumentation together, linking and excluding ideas and thoughts, and forming a semblance of clarity on the intricacies of literature and culture.

The dissemination of literary theory on the texts and articles I have been researching has opened up a great deal of differing avenues with which to further my insights and delve deeper into more specialized subject matter that relates to the overall themes I’ve been looking into. In this comparative article, I want to take a look at an essay I found recently from an online journal of sorts, called Proof – Reading Journalism and Society. It’s called ‘New Journalism’, Subjectivity and Postmodern News and it delves into the idea of subjectivity and the ideology of objectivity in journalism, how Tom Wolfe’s brand of ‘New Journalism’ sought to work against it. I’ll compare it to Roland Barthes essay The Death of the Author, which will allow for a more tangible way of defining ‘theory’ for me.

I’ve chosen New Journalism as a basis for applying theory in the past weeks. A couple of the key concepts that have arisen over and over in my research on the topic are the subjects of objectivity and subjectivity in the medium. In Maitrayee Basu‘s ‘New Journalism’, Subjectivity and Postmodern News, the question of objectivity is dealt with at length and she discusses the way in which the journalist-author is influenced by ideologies of objectivity and how it can lead to constructs within the realm of journalism, like ‘status anxiety’ and an epistemological gap present in its history. As well, she shows that this division of subjectivity and objectivity can cause rifts in the system of journalism, a blurring of the lines between non-fiction and fiction. Basu states, like many other scholars on the subject, that Tom Wolfe’s anthology, The New Journalism, was a confirmation of the postmodern shift from the objective reportage that dominated the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century. New Journalism sought to move towards a way of reporting that ‘read like a novel,’ unfolding more like a story with character development, dialogue and symbolism, and an intimate involvement of the journalist himself (or herself, of course), rather than fact based deliverance of information. It meant a rejection of the objective ideology, a penetration of a barrier that was coveted by most journalists who believe that objectivity allows for a neutralized, unbiased and more reliable ‘truth’ in reporting. Wolfe and his contemporaries reworked the definitions of the journalist, and the way journalism could be viewed and read.

Roland Barthes

A reflection of this idea can be found in the work of Roland Barthes in his essay The Death of the Author. In it, Barthes contends that the conventional ideals behind interpreting text can be argued as flawed and inappropriate. He states that there can be no author connected to the text, that there is only the text alone and to critically analyze that text one must remove the ideas of the author’s politics, biography and social stance completely, and focus only on the language and structure that forms what the audience reads. Therefore, Barthes is stating that the audience, or the reader, then becomes the author, as if to say that authorship is differed to the person reading. This concept relates directly to the idea of subjectivity in journalism, for if you were to transcribe the position Barthes has on authorship onto the objectivity of journalism, you could come to the conclusion that objectivity can be seen as something subversive and ultimately against the idea objectivity sought to carry out in the endeavor of neutrality in reportage.  If objectivity exists in the journalistic piece, than its subjectivity is differed to the audience, or the reader, and therefore the audience inscribes their own meaning into the news, and that objectivity is essentially lost.

I think this link that I have discovered within the comparison is important to relating the idea of objectivity in journalism to a post-structuralist viewpoint on the ideologies inherent in how journalists convey their message. It lends a helping hand to Wolfe’s position on New Journalism being as important as it was at the time when he coined the term in the late 60’s and early 1970’s. This comparison also relates back to what I stated at the beginning of the paper, that theory provides new and better understanding of the significance of literature, no matter what the genre. Theory, in this case worked to focus an argument, helping to exclude the idea of objectivity in journalism, and this is how ‘theory’ can come to be defined in a way for me to use in cultural and literary study, its not that difficult to break down and articulate. Theory is a navigational tool for understanding literature as it helps to clarify and contextualize ideas and thought within the literal sphere.