Craft Technique In Wolfe's The Right Stuff Apart

In an era of global technology, instant news, infomercials, electronic town meetings, and “Made for TV Documentaries,” the borderlines between news and analysis, news and entertainment, news and fiction are constantly shifting.

Around the time of the novels publication in the late 1960s, a new literary genre had begun to surface: New Journalism. New Journalism sought to combine the elements of news writing and journalism with the elements of fiction writing. Described as being a form of literature that “engages and excites”, it sought to challenge its readers not only “emotionally” but also “intellectually”. Typically, New Journalism consists of four major characteristics such as

I will analyse Tom Wolfe´s use of non-fiction and fiction in his new journalism piece “The Rich Have Feelings, Too”. The text is relatively straightforward where we follow the perspective of a wealthy man and his experiences with air travel, though it is a little ambiguous as it is inconsistent in being as easily understandable as possible. The text follows a set consistent linguistic style throughout the text with no shifts or changes. The narrator changes from being a first person narrator to a third person narrator in between some of the paragraphs, which makes it hard to follow a straight line through the piece. The thoughts are nowhere near coherent in this piece as the thoughts are somewhat scrambled throughout. Furthermore, on multiple

Clay Shirky who wrote Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable (1993) argues that society doesn’t need newspapers society needs journalism to save society. Shirky supports this argument by giving a historical background to the problems newspapers face and how the problems have developed over time and the solutions society has came up with. The blogger concludes that in order for journalism to go farther new models must be created in place of past molds. Shirky directs this blog toward the current and future generations in attempt to motivate new models and methods of journalism.

It is not always easy to look someone in the face and address their faults. Yet, Clare Booth Luce’s introduction of her speech is straight to the point and effective through her appeals to ethos and pathos as well as various tones to do just that. The purpose of her speech is to criticize the tendency of the American Press to sacrifice their journalistic integrity in favor of the public demand for sensationalist stores. In a number of ways, Luce is successful in setting up her speech’s message and working towards cushioning her audience for her upcoming

Nearly everybody has thought about writing as a career or a hobby, and it’s simple when you really put the time into it because these skills, like creativity are easy improving skills. Most successful journalists have great creativity and writing skills, especially in the current age when journalists are actually writing award-winning novels, like John Sandford, my father’s favorite author and more famously Mark Twain.

American journalist Clare Boothe Luce writes a speech to the Women’s National Press Club about how the press sacrifices sensationalist stories. Luce’s introduction talks about how the American press is wrong and how she tries to address the problem. She starts off by tells the other journalist how she is happy, but the audience makes her unhappy and challenged. This shows her hard work in writing and how the press lacks in writing true stories.

Intertwined within the novel is the presence of many different genres including letters, articles and magazine clippings, and pictures. At first sight there is the

Hunter S. Thompson was the man responsible for what is known today as gonzo journalism. This type of journalism is written in the first-person narrative and places the reporter in the middle of the action, allowing for personal experiences, emotions, and biases in a way that defies traditional journalism. Thompson’s subversive style of journalism was so radical that according to Jennifer Marinelli’s (2010) post on the Michigan Online News Association, “Thompson didn’t just create a new form of journalism. He created a new way of thinking that is still important in today’s society” (para. 2). In other words, he didn’t just transform journalism; he transformed people’s minds. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise that such a man could

Rather than the old-fashioned way in which journalism was performed, solely as a representation of facts, New Journalism also involved a subjective interpretation of what the author felt about what was going on within the matter that they were working on. It worked against saying that “one of the unconscious assumptions of modern criticism that the raw material is simply ‘there.’ It is the ‘given,’” (Wolfe 11), instead saying that audience is not looking for the facts behind the story, but instead the truth behind the actions that were taken. They were looking for the ‘why’ instead of the ‘what.’ Many journalists followed this time, with a couple of them not only finding success in what they did, but also originating a genre that is popular even to this day. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is not only the first true-crime novel to be written, but also considered by many to be the first nonfiction novel in existence. Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was controversial for its use of gonzo journalism behind Thompson’s explicit drug use throughout. Lastly, rock critic Robert Christgau, who is still working today, revolutionized music criticism by

Wolfe describes the specific places, planes, and other details unfamiliar to most readers to help them visualize the landscape and make the reader feel like they are in the location being described. An example of this vivid description of details by Wolfe would be the following which describe Muroc Airfield, “Besides the wind, sand, tumbleweed, and Joshua trees, there was nothing at Muroc except for two quonset-style hangars, side by side, a couple of gasoline pumps, a single concrete runway, a few tarpaper shacks, and some tents” (117). Wolfe describes many things in this passage, primarily he describes all of the main objects you would see when arriving at Muroc.

“The whole problem with news on television comes down to this all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on one page of a newspaper”. The average news cast is only twenty-two minutes long,and that's not nearly enough time to cover the days events.In Neil Postman’s essay “The News” Postman talks about the structure,content,and goals and results of a television news cast. The news can be compared to the theatres in terms of its structure. According to Postman, “Music takes us immediately into the realm of the symbolic, a world that is not to be taken literally.”

Early New Journalism is a product of alienation between the generation that emerged after World War II and their predecessors. That sense of alienation led to a need for connection and a craving for societal revolution, which, in turn, generated an age of radicalism. Reflecting that radicalism, journalism of the time is written as a detailed train of thought of the writer in order to create a connection with the audience. Similarly, new journalists often braid philosophical ideas into their historical accounts to further bridge the gap between author and audience. Doctor Hunter S. Thompson in his gonzo-journalist roman à clef, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, reflects upon the decline of youth culture rebellion during the late 1960’s to early 1970’s while on a trip to Las Vegas by expressing opinions to the reader via his distinctly blunt and

Taken at face value, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test may seem very similar. They are both centered on a major author of the 1960s and his experiencing of historical events of the time, while set in the style of New Journalism. When examined closer, though, it becomes apparent that these novels represent two very different sides of New Journalism – Armies of the Night an autobiography with personal and political motivations, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test a sociological piece which tries to capture the essence of its subjects rather than the absolute facts. By looking at the form and style which the novels were written in and the motives behind Mailer’s Armies of the Night and Wolfe’s The

Even after forty years, Hunter S. Thompson’s creation of gonzo journalism became a new style of writing that remains imitated. Gonzo journalism has many different characteristics; one of the most predominant is