ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the first-person point of view in literary journalism. It looks at the role of the first person in defining literary journalism as a genre, exploring how the first person has evolved historically in literary journalism, and identifying the range of issues that emerge when the reporter’s “I” makes its presence known. The chapter uses Kidder and Todd’s notions of first-person minor and first-person major and narratology concepts of focalization and dissonance to convey the degree of prominence and reflection first-person narrators attain in a work of literary journalism and the subsequent impact on reader empathy. The emphasis on “personalism” in the New Journalism era led to use of the first person in literary journalism’s struggle to impose order on an uncertain reality. The first-person literary journalism of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, influenced by the memoir boom, has given rise to the quest narrative, which applies the tools of journalism to investigate matters of personal importance to the journalist. While the first person illuminates the inherent subjectivity of the reporting process, it is also a construct that shapes the framing of the narrative, affecting a work’s emotional, moral, and thematic impact and underscoring subjectivity’s limits.
