Talk:Creative nonfiction

message: It's been suggested on the New Journalism talk page that it should be merged with Creative Nonfiction, as there is quite an overlap with NJ, CN and other terms such as Literary Journalism.  I think that a small subsection on this page explaining the origin of the term and perhaps the book of the same name might be appropriate.  (I know that there's an exhortation to be bold, but I'm fairly new and not quite bold enough to merge them myself without others commenting).  Liquidindian 06:13, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: How so?  I'd say that New Journalism is more of a fashionable term for a particular group of writers than exclusively describing a writing style.--Liquidindian 00:12, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

text: *Agreed. "New Journalism" was more of a period WITHIN Creative Nonfiction (see Wolfe, Capote, Didion and others) than a synonym for the genre. The articles should stay seperate. --Felldestroyed 03:16, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

text: There's alot of fairly obscure articles on here, and New Journalism is probably a more important movement than many of those which have been given their own articles. I think the link of 'related articles' is enough for people looking at either to check out the connections. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.130.24.10 (talk • contribs) 
☼ Being immersed in new journalism directly (I am a journalist that is called a New Games Journalist, but we use most, if not all, of the "new journalism" techniques), I believe no change should be made to this title or category. --K —Preceding unsigned comment added by KristinNcarpenter (talk • contribs) 
>>I think the overarching major genre is "Creative Nonfiction" with "New Journalism" being a style of Creative Nonfiction, similar to nature writing or travel writing.  I wouldn't want to see this well said article reduced, but inclusion under CNF seems fine to me.  Rick —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.234.112.69 (talk • contribs) 
* Do not merge, otherwise the article on New Games Journalism falls apart as well Romanista 11:03, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge with New Journalism

message: It's my understanding that Literary Journalism is in fact a particular TYPE of Creative Nonfiction.  I don't think it's accurate to say "Creative Nonfiction, also called Literary Journalism..."  You could just as (in)accurately say "Creative Nonfiction, also called memoir..." or "Creative Nonfiction, also called personal essay..."  Anyone else have an opinion on this? Hyperjoy7 03:31, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Creative Nonfiction vs. Literary Journalism

message: It's a good start but some of the contentions are questionable. Mailer as a pioneer of CNF? The list of representative authors had been very skewed toward New Journalism, which could explain the discussion above. I question some of the choices but preferred to take an additive approach. This article could use a section on form similar to the one for fiction, which would also provide a place to discuss the many literary journals where much of this writing is published. Freerangelibrarian 14:06, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Expanding and correcting this article

message: I'm sorry to put this here but even after reading about how to cite references I'm a little confused. I'd like to use this definition from Fourth Genre in the section on form and have several other links for this article.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Freerangelibrarian (talk • contribs) 15:41, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: references

message: I've never heard such a phrase. I admit that it's hard to describe "uncreative" nonfiction. Also, is it a convention to list practitioners so high in an article? I would think a discussion of form would go higher (and would incorporate that side discussion about poem/prose, which is given too much weight where it is now). A brief discussion of the confusing terms might help... e.g. "nonfiction novel" versus "narrative nonfiction" versus "literary nonfiction," etc.  (For that matter I'd like to rewrite this page so it read better anyway.) Freerangelibrarian 11:12, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: research nonfiction; structure of this article

message: Truly my next goal is to write a history of creative nonfiction. I feel dissatisfied by the litany of authors and also believe this article would be better served by a history of the genre, from Montaigne's essays through Woolf and E.B. White and on through the present day. Freerangelibrarian 21:37, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: needs history section

message: Oh, and did not know about it. Thanks for the information ...  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.83.251.141 (talk) 17:58, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  thx for this post 

message: The latest edits to this page are written so poorly that I really must disassociate myself with this project. I can't babysit this 24x7, and I returned to this page intending to show it to a friend only to find it riddled with the passive voice, academic jargon, and dubious statements out of touch with mainstream thinking in this genre. Y'all have fun with this, but I give up. freerangelibrarian   —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.224.220.60 (talk) 14:04, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  I give up 

message: Literary journalism and "creative nonfiction" are not the same thing.  Literary journalism is a specific type of creative nonfiction, which also serves as an umbrella for all sorts of other prose such as memoir, autobiography, essay, history, etc.  The words "literary" and "journalism" have specific referents: journalism indicates that acts of reporting are an integral component of the work, and literary indicates that the style of writing borrows rhetorical elements from literature.  Here is the definition I use in my dissertation: "Literary journalism is a type of nonfiction writing that adheres to all of the reportorial and truth-telling covenants of traditional journalism, while employing rhetorical and storytelling techniques more commonly associated with fiction.  In short, it is journalism as literature."  As you can see, this is much more specific than the broad category of "Creative Nonfiction."
Additionally, New Journalism is an era in literary journalism history and not a synonym for the form.  
Moreover, there is an international academic organization devoted to the study of literary journalism: International Association for Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS). This association holds a scholarly conference once a year and puts out a peer-reviewed journal twice a year.  And I can tell you that it has been mentioned several times at these conferences how unfortunate and misguided the Wikipedia redirect is for literary journalism.
Finally, the list of references in this section is woeful.  It indicates to anyone with any knowledge about literary journalism that the writers and editors of this page do not understand the history or significance of the genre.  Although it is a useful and interesting collection of stories, there is more to the form (and much more to the scholarship) that Kerrane + Yagoda's The Art of Fact.  For scholarship on literary journalism history please see: 
Norman Sims, ed. The Literary Journalists Ballantine 1984
Norman Sims, ed. Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century Ballantine 1990 (republished in 2008 by Northwestern University Press)
Thomas B. Connery, ed. A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism  Greenwood Press 1992
Norman Sims + Mark Kramer, eds. Literary Journalism Ballantine 1995
John Hartsock, A History of American Literary Journalism University of Massachusetts Press 2000
Norman Sims, True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism Northwestern University Press 2007
Kathy Forde Roberts, Literary Journalism on Trial: Masson v. The New Yorker University of Massachusetts Press 2008
John Bak + Bill Reynolds, Literary Journalism Across the Globe University of Massachusetts Press 2011
And those are just the ones with LJ in the title, off the top of my head.  
I'm not sure what is needed for Literary Journalism to have its own page, but there is absolutely no dispute that it needs one, that it is different from "creative nonfiction" and that there is an entire community of scholars across the globe who studied and write about this distinct form of writing.
Feel free to contact me directly.  I'll write the damn page.  jmr197@case.edu  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.5.109.34 (talk) 20:56, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Literary Journalism Needs Its Own Page 

message: The article says: 
This despite the fact that the history of the Talk page demonstrates a concensus that CNF is not under the purview of literary journalism. That, if the two concepts are related at all, then it is that CNF describes an overarching genre, ie poetry, fiction, drama, and literary journalism is a subcategorization. I have not read D'Agata's Lifespan of a Fact, but another of his works, About a Mountain, plays with fact fluidly and does not hold to the ethics of journalism. The fundamental disconnect here is that CNF is about structure and narrative and creativity, while journalism purports to be a public good, ie Fourth Estate, whose credibility is founded on fact-based reporting. Nonfiction describes both practices because CNF is clearly not fiction in that the world of the story is very much our own, invention limits itself to a few changes of fact (in ethical instances), similarly journalism writes of our "real" world. This is why I think it would be better to revise that conclusion entirely to say that Spinfuzz (talk) 02:20, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Micharacterization in Ethics subhead 

message: Where's Capote's In Cold Blood now? It's really famous. Even if it's an example of a subgenre it ought to be mentioned. --96.233.83.186 (talk) 14:08, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Capote missing 

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thread_title:  External links modified