Literatures of Fact at American Magazines

Redekop, Stephanie; Redekop, Stephanie

This panel examines how American magazines managed the complex relationship between facts and literature in the twentieth century. Scholarly conversations about this relationship have been generatively—but frequently—examined in the context of postmodern theory. But while theorists in the academy challenged facts’ referential nature and “totalizing” claims to objective description, American magazines developed a range of practices that navigated the aesthetic potential of facts and the factuality of literature in a different way. We take a fresh approach to the scholarly conversation by re-appraising twentieth-century American literature through these institutional practices.

Facts have been a contested subject in theories of poetics, fiction, and the literary. On the one hand, as Hannah Arendt writes, facts present an obstinate opaqueness that disqualifies them from the aesthetic or literary. They represent a refusal to imagine or interpret. On the other hand, the anxieties about facts currently saturating our media cultures reveal that facts can generate powerful affective and aesthetic experiences. Too often, these are treated as distinctly contemporary anxieties. Our panel historicizes twentieth-century American literature around these concerns about factuality and explicates the role that American magazines have played in raising, forming, and mitigating them over the last century.

This panel extends the work of the PMLA feature “Poetics of Fact, Politics of Fact” (2019). It is also informed by Sianne Ngai's theorization of the “merely interesting” as an aesthetic category (2012), and by recent monographs on the literary implications of twentieth-century knowledge work (Schryer 2011; Liu 2004). While these scholars interrogate bifurcations between the factual and the aesthetic, they have not focused explicitly on the fact—a distinct epistemological unit with particular implications in the twentieth century (Poovey 1998).

Our methodology also reflects recent shifts in literary studies that Jeremy Rosen has called “the institutional turn.” Such literary-sociological methods allow us to explore how magazines navigated the aesthetic potential of factuality and the danger of errors. As Sophie Seita argues, the “magazine is the medium through which we can analyze the collective and collaborative work of writers, editors, and readers across time” (2019). We take it likewise to be the medium through which we can re-historicize facts in American literature.

Chad Hegelmeyer begins the panel with “Interest and Irritation in the Poetics of Modern Fact-Checking” which examines how and why The New Yorker began fact-checking poetry. Hegelmeyer reads the rise of fact-checking and the New Criticism as motivated by a modernist anxiety about error and poetic failure. While both are preoccupied with referential material, each privileges different affective responses to such material: it either attracts our interest or provokes our irritation. Hegelmeyer argues that these affective responses reveal facts’ uneasy relation to the contexts in which they are embedded. Facts either fit pleasingly, filling gaps and connecting poems to reality in a way that enlivens our experience of both, or they appear as unassimilable debris whose irrelevance is conspicuous and distracting.

Next, Stephanie Redekop turns her attention to “Fact(oid)s and Fictions: The Magazine Essay in the 1960s.” Redekop demonstrates that well-documented anxieties about the novel’s “exhaustion” can be productively understood in conjunction with contemporary anxieties about fact-based public discourse. Redekop locates key models in the essays of Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer. Moving beyond isolated analyses of these essayists’ styles, Redekop examines their theorizations of the fact in relation to two distinct magazine contexts that helped to facilitate it: Partisan Review and Esquire. In so doing, Redekop argues that the magazine essay—a hybrid genre that combines literariness with factuality—is fundamental to midcentury American literary achievement and not merely a supplement to work in other genres.

Lastly, Stephen Schryer explores mid-century conservative anxieties about reportage in “Conservative Counter-Expertise: Fact and Opinion at National Review.” Schryer focuses on the literary community that emerged at National Review in the 1950s-60s. Starting with Garry Wills’s observation that the magazine was “the wrong place for learning how to be a journalist,” since “it lived on little nutriment of fact,” Schryer explores the model of counter-expertise that the magazine institutionalized. This model was rooted in conservatives’ belief that magazine media was dominated by liberals and that its techniques for producing facts were compromised. Starting with William F. Buckley, Jr.’s God and Man at Yale, conservatives launched an epistemic assault on the notion of factuality that prefigured later conceptions of the postmodern condition. Writers like Wills recognized the troubling implications of this assault; at the same time, it informed the literary journalism that they would perform throughout their careers.

After these three 16-minute presentations, Redekop will moderate 20 minutes of discussion.

78V Literatures of Fact at American Magazines: Calls for Papers