ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the relationship between works of literary journalism and certain concepts of the postmodern by thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. Following a discussion of scholarship on what has been canonized as New Journalism, the chapter asserts that, in his work, the writer David Foster Wallace promoted an exemplary, further intensification of the literary journalist’s self-consciousness that extended focus to the role of language itself. The chapter then analyzes recent texts by John Jeremiah Sullivan, George Saunders, and Mac McClelland that both emphasize the ubiquity of difference and convey generative senses of what cannot be represented. It argues that they reflect postmodern ideas of knowledge and language in a specific mode of self-conscious experimental realist representation. In this mode, the act of making, which has traditionally been associated with fictional discourse, is always already and necessarily part and parcel of both reality and its textual representation.
