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Witnessing and the Theorization of Reportage

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Literary Journalism and Social Justice

Abstract

Reportage, the name for the literary genre of the eyewitness account, has been used interchangeably with literary journalism. This chapter tracks the genre’s intercultural theorization as a tool for social change. Key to the genre’s politicization, driven by Marxist writers between the two world wars, was the acknowledgment of the reporter’s distinct quality as human medium with a class identity, which occurred in two steps. First, Egon Erwin Kisch asserted reportage’s specific epistemological quality rooted in phenomenological experience. Then, Walter Benjamin urgently challenged existing notions of reportage in order to address the threat of fascism, which he associated with the emerging technical media of photography and film.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Mark Kramer, “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists,” Nieman Foundation, 1995, http://nieman.harvard.edu/stories/breakable-rules-for-literary-journalists/; Norman Sims, True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 12; John C. Hartsock, Literary Journalism and the Aesthetics of Experience (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016).

  2. 2.

    Richard Keeble and John Tulloch, “Introduction: Mind the Gaps, On the Fuzzy Boundaries between the Literary and the Journalistic,” in Global Literary Journalism: Exploring the Journalistic Tradition, 1:1–19 (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 7.

  3. 3.

    If we view literary journalism as discipline rather than genre, I would contend that reportage is a specific genre of literary journalism just like the feature, the essay, or the memoir. Despite certain semantic differences between European and American definitions of reportage, historically, the two terms have also been used interchangeably. For instance, the term reportage was considered at the founding conference of the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies. Joshua Roiland, “By Any Other Name: The Case for Literary Journalism,” Literary Journalism Studies 7, no. 2 (2015), 72. Additionally, the website of the IALJS refers to its mission as “the improvement of scholarly research and education in Literary Journalism/Reportage”; International Association of Literary Journalism Studies, “About Us,” International Association of Literary Journalism Studies, Accessed April 30, 2018. http://ialjs.org/about-us/.

  4. 4.

    Marc Martin, Les Grands Reporters: Les Débuts Du Journalisme Moderne (Paris: L. Audibert, 2005); Michael Homberg, Reporter-Streifzüge: Metropolitane Nachrichtenkultur und die Wahrnehmung der Welt 1870–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 50–52.

  5. 5.

    Hartsock, Literary Journalism and the Aesthetics of Experience, 100.

  6. 6.

    Oxford English Dictionary, “Report,” accessed October 5, 2018, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/162918?

  7. 7.

    Hartsock, “Literary Journalism,” 83; James Marcus, ed., Second Read: Writers Look Back at Classic Works of Reportage (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Robert B. Silvers, ed., The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage (New York: New York Review Books, 2013).

  8. 8.

    Joaquin Roy, “Reportage,” in Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. Tracy Chevalier (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), 696.

  9. 9.

    John Cary, “Introduction,” in The Faber Book of Reportage, ed. John Carey (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), xxix.

  10. 10.

    Ian Jack, “Introduction,” in The Granta Book of Reportage (London: Granta Books, 2006), vi.

  11. 11.

    Dieter Mayer, “Die Epoche der Weimarer Republik,” in Geschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, eds. Viktor Žmegač, Bernd Balzer, Kurt Bartsch, and Dieter Borchmeyer. (Königstein: Athenäum Verlag, 1984), 76.

  12. 12.

    Keith Williams, “The Will to Objectivity: Egon Erwin Kisch’s ‘Der rasende Reporter,’” The Modern Language Review 85, no. 1 (1990), 94.

  13. 13.

    Egon Erwin Kisch, “Wesen des Reporters,” in Reporter und Reportagen: Texte zur Theorie und Praxis der Reportage der Zwanziger Jahre, ed. Erhard Schütz (Giessen: Andreas Achenbach, 1974), 40. Emile Zola’s The Experimental Novel (1880) wasn’t translated into German until 1904, two years after Zola’s death.

  14. 14.

    Kisch, “Wesen des Reporters,” 44.

  15. 15.

    Kisch, “Wesen des Reporters,” 41.

  16. 16.

    Egon Erwin Kisch, Der rasende Reporter (Berlin: Erich Weiss Verlag, 1925), VI–VII.

  17. 17.

    Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  18. 18.

    Egon Erwin Kisch, “Soziale Aufgaben der Reportage,” in Mein Leben für die Zeitung 1926–1947: Journalistische Texte 2 (Berlin und Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1983), 11.

  19. 19.

    Egon Erwin Kisch, “John Reed, Ein Reporter auf der Barrikade,” in Mein Leben für die Zeitung 1926–1947: Journalistische Texte 2 (Berlin und Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1983), 104.

  20. 20.

    Kisch, “Soziale Aufgaben,” 9.

  21. 21.

    John Durham Peters, “Witnessing,” in Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication, eds. Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 30.

  22. 22.

    Sybille Krämer and Sigrid Weigel, “Introduction,” in Testimony/Bearing Witness: Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture, eds. Sybille Krämer and Sigrid Weigel (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), x–xii.

  23. 23.

    Egon Erwin Kisch, “Reportage als Kunstform und als Kampfform,” in Reporter und Reportagen: Texte zur Theorie und Praxis der Reportage der Zwanziger Jahre, ed. Erhard Schütz (Giessen: Achenbach, 1974), 47.

  24. 24.

    Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 41.

  25. 25.

    Erhard Schütz, Kritik der literarischen Reportage (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1977), 13–14.

  26. 26.

    Schütz, Kritik, 13–15.

  27. 27.

    Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany (London, Verso: 1998), 32.

  28. 28.

    Benjamin, “An Outsider Makes His Mark,” in Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 1, 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 306.

  29. 29.

    Benjamin, “Outsider,” 309.

  30. 30.

    Benjamin, “Outsider,” 309.

  31. 31.

    Keith Williams, “‘History as I Saw It’: Inter-War New Reportage,” Literature and History 1, no. 2 (1992), 40–41.

  32. 32.

    Devin Fore, “Introduction,” in October, no. 118, Soviet Factography, (Fall 2006), 6.

  33. 33.

    Fore, “Introduction,” 6.

  34. 34.

    Fore, “Introduction,” 9; Hartsock, Literary Journalism, 106–116.

  35. 35.

    Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 80.

  36. 36.

    Benjamin, “Author,” 89.

  37. 37.

    Benjamin, “Author,” 91.

  38. 38.

    Benjamin, “Author,” 93.

  39. 39.

    Benjamin, “Author,” 80.

  40. 40.

    Benjamin, “Author,” 79–80.

  41. 41.

    Benjamin, “Author,” 89.

  42. 42.

    Sybille Krämer, Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 144–146.

  43. 43.

    Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (London: Allen Lane, 2009).

  44. 44.

    Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 18.

  45. 45.

    Derek Paget, True Stories? Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen and Stage (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 39–40.

  46. 46.

    Paget, True Stories, 40.

  47. 47.

    Krämer, Medium, 151.

  48. 48.

    Peters, “Witnessing,” 37.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Pascal Sigg

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  1. Pascal Sigg
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Correspondence to Pascal Sigg .

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  1. Department of English Language and Literature, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

    Robert Alexander

  2. Faculty of Arts Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature (MCCALL), Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Willa McDonald

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Sigg, P. (2022). Witnessing and the Theorization of Reportage. In: Alexander, R., McDonald, W. (eds) Literary Journalism and Social Justice . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89420-7_5

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