Spanish and Latin American narrative journalism: a comparative of issues, influences, publications and points of view of a new generation of authors (original) (raw)
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This article purports to demonstrate that print and digital publications offering highquality narrative journalism in Spanish are gaining an increasingly wider readership. Furthermore, readers of magazines such as Orsai and Jot Down are willing to pay for longform journalism that meets their aesthetic standards. What theorists such as Boynton and editors such as Kilman have asserted has now been confirmed: the key is creativity. This paper offers a chronological overview of the genre that helps explain why is there is so much talk about a boom in Latin- American narrative journalism today and provides an in-depth analysis of how the combination of conventional and groundbreaking styles of journalism has spelled out success for two of these publications. Keywords: Literary journalism, narrative journalism, journalistic genres, new editorial models, Orsai, Jot Down.
The new Latin American journalistic crónica, emotions and hidden signs of reality
Latin America journalism, throughout history, has been snugly knitted to the rich literature tradition of the region. In the 19th century – the century of the de-colonisation struggle with the Spanish crown – Latin American writers began experimenting with hybrid forms of narrative. It was a quest for new ways of story telling; a hybrid form – the crónica – where story telling became a parallel journey taken by the novelist impatient to engage his or her writing with the new post colonial conditions. Since these early days, the crónica – or the chronicle – was embraced with aesthetic commitment and ideological conviction by some of the most celebrated novelists in the region. In the crónica – paraphrasing Cuban poet Alejo Carpentier – the journalist and the novelist turn out to be the same person. The exponents of the new crop of Latin American journalistic crónica – the central theme of this paper – could well be described as a post-literary boom generation of writers who – like their predecessors of the 19th century – are impatient to engage their writing with the 21st century post dictatorship conditions. The new cronistas don’t discard any stories, as long as they are part of the Latin American realism, in the sense of Zola’s realism instead of García Márquez’s magic realism. All of these stories have three literary nexuses; they read as fiction, they are true tales and they are overpoweringly socially progressive. This paper seeks to review, examine and perhaps propose pointers toward the conceptualization of the crónica, as a literary long form of journalism that has a distinctive Latin American diacritic, form and social undertaking.
The article rescues and analyzes the work done in 1960 by Antonio Gómez Alfaro, the first Spanish author that carried out a study on relations between journalism and literature using a multidiscipline perspective. The tradition documents the emergence of comparative approaches at the end of the 1990s, but the revision of Gómez Alfaro’s proposal is an exceptional advance, because this intellectual dealt with the merging of literature and journalism with the assistance of scientific fields that range from literary theory to linguistics and anthropology. This multi-focal approach is extraordinary considering at the time Journalism was not part of the Spanish university system; therefore, there was not a scientific platform nor were there academic precedents that supported in-depth, exhaustive research about journalism and literature, a reality that appeared forty years after the publication of the aforementioned precursor. In order to provide an adequate context to the analysis of Gómez Alfaro’s work, the first part undertakes a historic synthesis from when the discussion about journalism as a literary genre arose in 1845 in the Spanish Real Academia, until the birth of the first scientific theories about literary journalism in the 1980s and 90s. Keywords: Journalism and Literature; Literary Journalism; Spain; Antonio Gómez Alfaro.
Argentine Literary Journalism: The Production of a Critical Discourse
Latin American Research Review
Todo genuino movimiento literario, todo amanecer, toda ruptura, ha tenido indefectiblemente su primera exteriorización en las hojas provocativas de una revista. La revista descubre, polemiza; el escritor de revistas anticipa, es el guerrillero madrugado, el pionero que zampa terrenos intactos. La revista es vitrina y es cartel. El libro ya es en cierto modo un ataúd, quizás más duradero y más perfecto, pero menos jugoso y vital.
The concept of the New Journalism and its adaptation to narrative journalism in Spain
2017
The New Journalism generates massive terminological confusion regarding what it represents. In general, it is usually associated with any stylistic innovation in journalism, which leads to numerous errors and confusion in the field of communication. As a result, specialized researchers or students do not have a clear idea of what the New Journalism constitutes. In this research, we try to answer the question of what the New Journalism is, what its origins are, the time period during which this phenomenon existed, if it had any influence in Spain, and as such, whether or not we can talk about the New Journalism in Spain. In order to obtain answers, we investigated the narrative journalism phenomenon, which has given us a wider view of the issue in order to put the New Journalism in context and provide a clear classification of this phenomenon.
The New Journalism generates massive terminological confusion regarding what it represents. In general, it is usually associated with any stylistic innovation in journalism, which leads to numerous errors and confusion in the field of communication. As a result, specialized researchers or students do not have a clear idea of what the New Journalism constitutes. In this research, we try to answer the question of what the New Journalism is, what its origins are, the time period during which this phenomenon existed, if it had any influence in Spain, and as such, whether or not we can talk about the New Journalism in Spain. In order to obtain answers, we investigated the narrative journalism phenomenon, which has given us a wider view of the issue in order to put the New Journalism in context and provide a clear classification of this phenomenon. Resumen: El Nuevo Periodismo genera una enorme confusión terminológica en cuanto a qué representa. En líneas generales se suele asociar a cualquier innovación estilística en periodismo. Esto conlleva numerosos errores y confusiones en el ámbito comunicativo, y por ende, investigadores especializados o estudiantes en formación no reciben una imagen clara de lo que representa. En esta investi-gación planteamos dar respuesta a qué podemos denominar, con propiedad, Nuevo Periodismo, cuál fue su origen y qué periodo temporal abarca este fenómeno y si tuvo alguna influencia en España y por tanto podemos hablar de un Nuevo Periodismo es-pañol. Para obtener estas respuestas recurriremos al fenómeno del periodismo narrativo, que nos dará una visión más global para poder ubicar el Nuevo Periodismo en su contexto y aportar una clasificación coherente sobre este fenómeno.
Beyond Crónica: Journalism in Contemporary Latin American Documentary Narratives
2018
n one of the final scenes of Cristian Alarcón’s Cuando me muera quiero que me toquen cumbia. Vidas de pibes chorros (2003), the journalist is visiting Sabina, one of his sources, in a poor neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, when a shooting occurs. The male neighbours take their guns and run out to the streets, encouraged by the women to defend their villa. Crouching down behind the curtains, spying from the window, the journalist notices that, except for a child, he is the only one who remains in the house, “amariconadamente escondido” (112). There is a double notion of field in this image of the journalist at work. Alarcón’s selfrepresentation in this scene illustrates the medial position of the documentary author in two fields in which the other is encountered. First, there is the physical space of the encounter with the informant, whose background differs from that of the narrator. Alarcón marks this difference, and thus his outsider position, by representing a surprised narrator, hi...
2011
THE PARROT AND THE CANNON. JOURNALISM, LITERATURE AND POLITICS IN THE FORMATION OF LATIN AMERICAN IDENTITIES Pablo Calvi The Parrot and the Cannon. Journalism, Literature and Politics in the Formation of Latin American Identities explores the emergence of literary journalism in Latin America as a central aspect in the formation of national identities. Focusing on five periods in Latin American history from the post-colonial times until the 1960s, it follows the evolution of this narrative genre in parallel with the consolidation of professional journalism, the modern Latin American mass media and the formation of nation states. In the process, this dissertation also studies literary journalism as a genre, as a professional practice, and most importantly as a political instrument. By exploring the connections between journalism, literature and politics, this dissertation also illustrates the difference between the notions of factuality, reality and journalistic truth as conceived in Latin America and the United States, while describing the origins of Latin American militant journalism as a social-historical formation. Many thanks to Andie Tucher, Todd Gitlin and Graciela Montaldo for their mentoring and support. Their insightful observations and constant counseling helped me see both the tree and the forest in the vast jungle of Latin American journalism. Their generosity with time and ideas exceeded what I could have ever hoped for. Thanks to Brigitte Nacos who was always gentle, attentive and enthusiastic about this dissertation. Our conversations were unfailingly stimulating and fun, and helped me keep track of the rare occasions when I was aiming in the right direction. A fellowship at CELSA,