NRJ Book Reviews : Journalism and Realism: Rendering American Life

NRJ Book Reviews Thomas B. Connery, Journalism and Realism: Rendering American Life (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2011) 281 pages, $24.95 (paperback).Review by Joe HaydenIf you love literature, you are well aware of the affinity between the realm of letters and that of the press, between authors and journalists-or what used to be called bookmen and newsmen. You probably noticed in college that most of America's great novelists, for example, spent time as newspaper reporters or editors and sometimes gravitated back toward their earlier profession and occasionally did both at the same time. Perhaps it is not surprising that writers experiment with genres and careers as they grope their way in the literary marketplace, to use Christopher Wilson's phrase from The Labor of Words. One's occupation is seldom accidental.More elusive than vocation, however, is the actual stuff of those livelihoods- the content, the functionality, the art. And this is Thomas B. Connery's contribution in Journalism and Realism. He is tracing thread shared by belles-lettres and beat writing alike. The thread is realism, and its tapestry spans both fiction and non-fiction, words and pictures, high-brow and kitsch.Connery's synthesis examines the development of this motif, a paradigm of actuality (p. 9), that wasn't just confined to literature but permeated the nation's entire culture. This intellectual history offers no new characters or works, but it does strive to show the connections between them and also to explain how news writing in particular nurtured them. While an assertion that his study validates journalism's essential role in fostering the realistic sensibility is overstated because it's too lightly argued, there's no question that this is indeed an important etiological quest with tantalizing evidence for his thesis.The author acknowledges early on that proclamations about realism in art or are inherently risky because they are so subjective and relative. But he insists that there was a shift during the nineteenth nineteenth century in the focus and nature of American cultural forms of expression of all types, that the new paradigm can be defined by focus on the actual and real, on people, events, and details that are verifiable and based on observation and experience (p. 14).According to Connery, the penny press exerted seminal influence on this style by emphasizing news-gathering and providing frequent factuality. James Gordon Bennett's famous inquiry into the death of prostitute is case in point. However lurid and sensationalistic, the New York Herald's stories broke new ground in aggressively going after the truth. The firsthand reporting combined with descriptive writing was significant push into that different direction (p. 34).Two dabblers in this still-nascent movement were supposedly Walt Whitman and George G. Foster-flâneurs, the French word for idlers or strollers, who wrote about the people, places, and events they encountered on their sojourns. But Whitman is not neat fit for this analysis, perhaps placed in the chapter alongside Foster for his life and legacy more than his writing. Even his wasn't especially marked by fact-laden narratives but by broader cultural interpretations. In many respects, says Connery, Whitman's writing/ reporting is an early, rough, and unfinished version of early literary journalism (p. 49). Foster, however, is an excellent prototype. His recollections of ordinary people ring with authenticity, while his savory descriptions of market fare read like something out of folk-foodie blog.Throughout Foster's writing, as well as that of subsequent realists, is recurring dialectic with romanticism and idealism. Few writers of the 19th century wrote wholly in one style or the other but normally blended the two instead. …