Dear John, I heard you, but….

Hi John Bak,

Thank you for another epic IALJS conference. The calibre of papers and their breadth is growing each year, and your hospitality and generosity was so welcome. I am confident I write for everyone that we did, indeed, feel welcome. Basically, as one of the founding scholars, look what you have accomplished!

I am flying at approximately 34,000 feet above Europe as I write, beginning my flight across three continents and something like 11 countries to get home to Australia. It is going to take more than 24 hours. It all somehow seems apt, considering where I have just been and what I am thinking. The relatively slow yet paradoxical speed of the flight, elongating my thinking. I am mulling over what you said at the plenary, and I know why you said it, but I have some thoughts …

It was your inference, and what I have heard many others actually echo throughout the years, that we must move on from Wolfe etc. To be honest, I have felt it myself at times. You also write in your excellent Introduction to Literary Journalism across the Globe: ‘We should not treat New Journalism like the Ten Commandments of literary journalism and hold up the world’s production of the form in comparison, as many international forms pre-date it’ (2017: 18). That was nearly a decade ago. Diving into this text made me reflect on what you have been writing and saying for that long now, and I guess what underpinned your plenary statement. You must be quite exasperated. We all seem still to stay in our siloed national lanes. I believe what you are calling for is a conflation of scholarship underpinning our work – looking beyond borders to deeper, richer understandings of the form with all its nuances. As you write: ‘… pit international literary journalists against Wolfe’s manifesto’ (18), to test it globally.

We all know there are many pre-Wolfe examples of literary journalism, with attendant critique, but the development of theories swirling around this field really began with him, right? He gave us in the Anglophone world a shape to look out for and reasons for that shape, without really knowing what he was doing or starting. He began the ‘thinking’ about literary journalism as opposed to the doing and the critique of literary journalism. Not a scholar, but doing the embryonic work of a scholar. A watershed moment, perhaps.

So, Wolfe, then Sims, Hartsock and Connery, Kramer, Lounsberry and Applegate etc, they are our foundational theorists, looking at practice examples and asking themselves, what is going on here? And yes, we must interrogate their work and develop their work, but not include them in our work? Impossible. We must continue to include them.

It is all right to question and query where they were coming from and what they claim, but to disregard them because we have heard it all before? It would be like the post-structuralists dismissing Lacan and Derrida, or Butler or Kristeva. Or sociologists dismissing Weber or Martineau or Bourdieu or Moreton-Robinson or bell hooks or Beauvoir. Or social theorists dismissing Marx or Adorno or Habermas or Barthes or Foucault. Can you even imagine? Those scholars are held up with the greatest esteem in their fields. Interrogated, debated and critiqued, and developed, but always there. And where all PhD candidates begin researching in these fields.

Not for one minute am I equating Wolfe to these scholars. Frankly, I think he would be horrified at that. But we need to continue to honour our pioneering thinkers, scholars and writers similarly or we risk ‘othering’ ourselves within the academy; diminishing our scholarly standing. We run the risk of devaluing the Literary Journalism discipline canon ourselves and isolating it – making it different and perhaps even less rigorous than other canons. Every discipline has foundational work, drawn on and interrogated and argued about and developed. That is good academic practice. We all know this.

For example, one of my current creative PhD candidates – a young man, first in family to attend university, and with great talent and commitment – came across Wolfe by himself, and literally, lit up! It was in his eyes, then on the metaphorical page. Here was an essay that set out in a clear and annunciated way of thinking, a formula that made so much sense to his studies. And through his eyes, I saw afresh the joy of Wolfe; what Wolfe wrote then; what his intention was; how he was letting us know ‘something’ was going on, but he wasn’t quite sure, although he knew in no way was it ‘new’ – and it was exciting. Wolfe was ‘new’ to my candidate and inspired him; this in turn re-inspired me. Seriously, read the essay again. And imagine how it disrupted and polarised at the time; what fun it must have been, back then. Wolfe was playful and he was irreverent – we should all learn from that alone.

But this candidate also realised that the complete formula – the infamous four Wolfian elements – did not exactly fit; was not exactly what he was doing with his data research, despite initial excitement at its discovery. So, he massaged them, all the while attributing their genesis. He has developed Wolfe and currently is travelling through the Anglophone literary journalism canon with unabated joy with each new scholar he finds: Sims, Hartsock, Connery, Keeble, Tulloch, Boynton, Reynolds – all the way through to McDonald and Alexander, Meuret, Phillips, Trindade, Calvi, Garman and Cowling and you, John. And he is not finished yet. He is working his way through our canon, and it is a canon. One we should be proud of, from its emergent and possibly un-realised beginnings in the 1970s to our own brilliant Literary Journalism Studies. And when he is published, other young scholars will find his work and build on it. You know this – we all know this.

He also is including in his research the work of First Nations story-tellers here in Australia, and devising methods to ethically collect their narratives; not the centuries old sacred, untellable stories but their contemporary ones. And so, he is engaging with Indigenous scholarship so sorely and shamingly disregarded by Anglo scholarship in Australia. So rich and powerful yet diminished and marginalised; never quite woven through the Anglo work but somehow, kept to the side, to the detriment of all. Dare I write, segregated.

And I have challenged him to look further afield – of course I have. We are talking about other international canons, European in particular because that historically is where the genesis of his field of literature studies sits, so many centuries before our English-speaking Australian one. We are going to attempt to undertake some of the work you write about, back in your 2017 intro.

Parallel to this, let’s all look further afield to other countries and their canons – enquire if indeed there is a Tom Wolfe-type writer/journalist/character many decades back who realised similar issues were arising around their journalistic work in other countries; investigate the writings of their scholars. They must be there, right? We have to stretch ourselves and be truly interested in what other cultural renderings can offer us – this indeed may supplant the malaise around the provenance of our own canon; the beginning of the thinking about our canon. Find the equivalences and celebrate them. I know it needs translation and a lot of work, but our colleagues from the other-than-English-speaking countries already know – they work so vibrantly in their own languages and then front up in English for us, both in our publications and at our conferences. And I am always in awe of that; of them.

So, let’s think of the Spanish and Portuguese crónica; France’s reportage littéraire; Poland’s reportaz; literarischer journalismus in Germany; bibun kisha in Japan; baogao wenxue in China, and ocherk (очерк) in Russia, to name but a few.  We Anglophone scholars need to address these gaps in our own scholarship; return the gracious favour granted to us when our international colleagues draw on the Anglo canon. Diving into the special nation-based issues of LJS – it is literally at our fingertips – and drawing on the scholarship there to enrich our own understandings is a place to start. We must task our students to do the same – not lean into the English-speaking canon alone. Not to replace our canon, but to garner deeper, richer, multi-cultural knowledge about our field; they should sit alongside each other entangled, informing and enriching.

I feel the cringe-factor many of us feel when yet again we hear Wolfe cited is sorely misplaced. We should be proud of his work, what that essay actually did. Its impact. Where the scholars of this then emerging field, took it. We can critique their work, even criticise it, but we should not stop using their work. So let’s never again say we are bored of the work of our original thinkers at the beginning of the birth of a new scholarly field. Let’s gratefully sit on their shoulders with pride and debate how their efforts, their labour, their insight and their eventual scholarship are developing and getting re-imagined by those who follow us. Let’s find and interrogate comparable scholars across all other continents, indigenous and non-indigenous, right around the globe and thus, be truly and respectfully international.

Sincerely,

Sue Joseph

Associate Professor

Adelaide University,

South Australia