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- Title
Beyond the Program Era: Tracy Kidder, John D'Agata, and the Rise of Literary Journalism at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
- Authors
Dowling, David
- Abstract
The Iowa Writers' Workshop's influence on literary journalism extends beyond instructional method to its production of two writers who alternately sustained the traditions of the genre and boldly defied them: Tracy Kidder, who forged his career during the heyday of the New Journalism in the early 1970s, and John D'Agata, today's most controversial author challenging the boundaries of literary nonfiction. This essay examines the key works of Kidder and D'Agata as expressions of and reactions to Tom Wolfe's exhortation for a new social realism and literary renaissance fusing novelistic narrative with journalistic reporting and writing. Whereas a great deal of attention has been paid to Iowa's impact on the formation of the postwar literary canon in poetry and fiction, its profound influence on literary journalism within the broader world of creative writing has received little notice. Through archival research, original interviews, and textual explication, I argue that Kidder's narrative nonfiction reinforces Wolfe's conception of social realism, as theorized in "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," in sharp contrast to D'Agata's self-reflexive experimentation, toward a more liberally defined category of creative writing. Norman Sims defended literary journalists' immersion in "complex, difficult subjects" and narration "with a voice that allows complexity and contradiction," countering critics who claimed their work "was not always accurate." D'Agata has reopened the debate by exposing the narrative craft's fraught and turbulent relation to fact. That unstable, highly contested struggle remains carefully hidden from view in the smooth veneer of Kidder's traditional aesthetic of literary journalism.
- Subjects
CREATIVE nonfiction; AUTHORS; NONFICTION novel; KIDDER, Tracy; WOLFE, Tom, 1930-2018
- Publication
Literary Journalism Studies, 2016, Vol 8, Issue 1, p52
- ISSN
1944-897X
- Publication type
Article