Reading Literary Journalism: An Exploratory Study of Readers’ Experience
(2018) 13th International Conference for Literary Journalism Studies — Location: Vienna (Austria) (17.May.2018)
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- Authors
Vanoost, Marie 
- Abstract
- Literary journalism has been widely studied as both a reporting practice and a writing practice. It has been less explored as a reading practice. Many scholars have offered essential insight into a large variety of literary journalism texts, but few empirical studies have focused directly on readers’ experience. Readers’ experience nonetheless deserves attention as literary journalism’s raison d’être is to offer readers a different way to understand and relate to the world they live in. While acknowledging how vast and complex the question is, this paper consists in an exploratory study of readers’ experience of literary journalism. In this study five participants were asked to keep a nonfiction reading diary for three weeks and were then interviewed in depth about the reading activities they recorded in their journal. The participants, two females and three males, ranging from 29 to 84 years old, were recruited in a college town in the South of the United States. The paper details how and why the participants chose the nonfiction texts they read, as well as how they categorized and labelled these texts. It explores what they specifically looked for in literary journalism texts, what they liked and did not like, which texts had more impact on the participants and why. The paper also develops how readers reacted to emotion and suspense, and how they considered the author of the text.
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Citations
Vanoost, M. (2018). Reading Literary Journalism: An Exploratory Study of Readers’ Experience. 13th International Conference for Literary Journalism Studies, Vienna (Austria). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/56457