Journalism and Literature
Before starting this entry here's a piece of good news.
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I would also like to remind you that I still need your help with our writing project Nulla Dies Sine Linea. I need contribution every day until 28 April.
How the boundaries of journalism and literature are blurred these days...
The days when highbrowed writers would dismiss whole epochs as "feuilletonic" or mundanely journalistic (in the case of the great German writer Herman Hesse), the days when one writer would diminish another one by considering him too non-fictional and newspaperly (in the case of Nabokov judging the writing of Solzhenitsyn) are long gone.
Nowadays even the most refined and subtle knights of belles-lettres can't disregard tabloids or TV, Facebook or Twitter.
There was a time when journalism was considered to be a loaf of rye bread in a bakery that also offered croissants to éclairs (the latter standing metaphorically for different genres of literature).
Yes, it's true, that journalism reports here and now events, and the domain of literature tends to be more eternal.
The language and rhetoric of journalism are simpler and more straightforward.
The span of journalistic interest is also seemingly narrower and more predictable.
But don't you think that the whole of literature is moving towards journalism?
I'm not talking about the thriving non-fictional books boom (now the majority of bestsellers are non-fiction, aren't they?).
I mean contemporary literary works.
Topicality, experience described using simple and straightforward language with an easy message - aren't those qualities journalistic in their nature?
If 40 to 50 years ago it was usual to say that journalism was at its best a shadow of good literature, nowadays one is tempted to say that the best literature is reflection of a good journalism.
I'm going to talk more about it, as my compatriot Scheherazade would say at the end of her 1001 night -time tales.
But what do you think: who are the winners and who are the loses in this shift of direction in literature towards a simpler style in literature?
Writer in residence Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek novelist and poet. His work is banned in Uzbekistan and under threat of arrest he moved to London and joined 91Èȱ¬ World Service as a journalist. He is now head of the Central Asian service. 