Mediating the Real : : Self-Reflection in Recent American Reportage.

• Superior document: Gegenwartsliteratur Series
• Funder: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Author: Sigg, Pascal.; Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Place / Publishing House: Bielefeld : : transcript Verlag,, 2024.; ©2024.
• Year of Publication: 2024
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Gegenwartsliteratur Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (307 pages)

As a literary genre, the nonfictional reportage has particular implications for the role of the writer. Pascal Sigg shows how six U.S. American writers, including David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, reflect on themselves as human media in their reportage. The writers assert themselves in a postmodern way by scrutinizing their own mediation. As it also traces and develops the theorization of reportage as genre along the reporters' early concerns with technical media, this pioneering contribution to literary journalism studies paves a way for a new materialist approach in the under-researched field.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Mediating Mediatized Realities -- 1 Reportage and Mediation -- 1.1 The Complications of ‘Literary Journalism’ -- 1.2 The Human Qualities of Reportage -- 1.3 The Human Medium Inspecting Itself -- 2 On Real Communing: Mediating Coordinated Experience -- 2.1 Authenticity and Uncertainty in Touristic Experience -- 2.2 The Desperate Medium in David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” (1997) -- 2.3 The Believing Medium in George Saunders’s “The New Mecca” (2005) -- 2.4 The Incapable Medium in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Upon This Rock” (2012) -- 2.5 Uncertainties and the Negotiation of Trust in Communing -- 3 On Real Bodies: Mediating Other Human Media -- 3.1 Reflexive Subjectivities and Their Differences -- 3.2 The Mysterious Medium in George Saunders’s “Buddha Boy” (2007) -- 3.3 Aware Media in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Getting Down to What is Really Real” (2011) -- 3.4 Different Media in Mac McClelland’s “Delusion is the Thing With Feathers” (2017) -- 3.5 The Possibilities of Reflexivity -- 4 On Real Fragmentation: Mediating Violence -- 4.1 Material and Symbolic Violence -- 4.2 The Fractured Medium in George Saunders’s “Tent City, U.S.A.” (2009) -- 4.3 The Atoning Medium in Michael Paterniti’s “Should We Get Used To Mass Shootings?” (2016) -- 4.4 The Resilient Medium in Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s “A Most American Terrorist” (2017) -- 4.5 The Reflexivity of Violence -- Conclusion -- The Possibilities of Human Media -- Bibliography