How [is it] going to be possible to explain what this is really like? All you can say is, “This happened; that happened; he did this; she did that.” But this does not tell how the land looks on the way to Guadarrama, the smooth brown land, with olive trees and scrub oak growing beside the dry stream beds, and the handsome mountains curving against the sky. Nor does this tell of Sanchez and Ausino, and the others with them, those calm young men who were once photographers or doctors or bank clerks or law students, and who now shape and train their troops so that one day they can be citizens instead of soldiers. And there is no time to write of the school where the children were making little houses of clay, and dolls from cardboard, and learning to recite poetry and missed school only when the shelling was too bad. And what about all the rest, and all the others? How can I explain that you feel safe at this war, knowing that the people around you are good people?

—Martha Gellhorn, November 1937

Course Description

Modern journalism is grounded in fact, in close observation, information gathering and the discipline of verification. Above all else, reporters prize accuracy. Literature, on the other hand, is all about leaps of imagination and the writer’s distinctive voice. Novelists invite us to suspend our disbelief and inhabit the very consciousness of another. Instead of mere accuracy they aspire to truth. Some events, however—the Holocaust, the Atom Bomb—are so terrible in themselves that you simply couldn’t make them up. In such instances, the raw facts alone would appear to suffice for capturing readers’ imaginations. Indeed, heightening or embellishing them with literary devices seems almost in bad taste. How then are we to explain the way many of journalism’s freshest voices and most path breaking narrative techniques have emerged precisely out of the desire to bear witness to humanity’s most unspeakable crimes?

In this course we’ll grapple with that paradox. We’ll explore the tension between truth and accuracy and study new forms journalists have invented over the past 100 years in order to conjure the stark realities of poverty, war and human cruelty. We’ll focus on a series of texts from the 1930’s and ’40’s about rural Alabama, civil war Spain, Nazi death camps and nuclear devastation in Japan and finish with a thick description of destitution and survival at the margins of India’s newly globalized economy.

Readings

In addition to a variety of shorter readings, the following texts are required:

Agee, James & Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Mariner Books, 2001

Boo, Katherine.  Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.
New York: Random House, Available in paperback April 8, 2014

Hacker, Diana. A Pocket Style Manual, 5th ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009

Hersey, John.  Hiroshima. New York: Vintage, 1989

Levi, Primo.  Survival in Auschwitz.  New York: Touchstone Books, 1995

Orwell, George.  Homage to Catalonia. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1969