Grand reportage as the French form of literary journalism?
(2013) 8th International Conference for Literary Journalism Studies — Location: Tampere (Finland) (16.May.2013)
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- Authors
Vanoost, Marie 
- Abstract
- French scholars (Boucharenc & Deluche, 2001; Thérenty, 2007) consider grand reportage as a compromise between the factual journalism developing in the late 19th century and the French tradition of “literary” journalism. According to Thérenty (2007), what defines this genre is not the topic or the events reported, but the status of the reporter. Far from coolly recording facts, the grand reporter feels them: he is a prism through which every fact is subjectively coloured. This seems similar to the approach of American literary journalists. However, Hartsock distinguishes between the American form and a European form that he calls “literary reportage”: “while literary journalism engages Bakhtin’s inconclusive present, literary reportage historically has either done so or been co-opted by unambiguous ideology” (2011: 41). Hartsock mostly studied Russian and German practices. What about French grand reportage then? This paper will attempt to position the genre between narra-descriptive literary journalism and polemical literary reportage. It will mostly focus on Albert Londres, who is considered as the model of the grand reporter. Londres famously declared to his editors: “Sirs, you will learn to your cost that the reporter knows only one line, the railway line” (quoted by Muhlmann, 2008: 83). But he sometimes became the advocate of his reportages’ subjects, such as the convicts in penal colonies for whom he wrote an open letter to the minister in charge. The paper will detail this ambiguous approach and confront it to other examples of grand reportages, such as works of Joseph Kessel and overtly politically committed pieces.
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Citations
Vanoost, M. (2013). Grand reportage as the French form of literary journalism? 8th International Conference for Literary Journalism Studies, Tampere (Finland). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/222684