2001 Modern Language Association
December 27-30, 2001
New Orleans
Session Name: Crossing Over: Academics Writing Journalism and Nonfiction
A survey of the current literary landscape reveals a great deal of "crossover" writing: many academics write newspaper and magazine articles, memoirs, reviews, and essays; and increasing numbers of full-time journalists and writers have doctoral degrees in the Humanities. This panel is interested in the areas of interface, overlap, and creative tension between academic and "nonacademic" genres and the different roles that their writers take on - journalist, professor, independent scholar, creative writer, and critic.
How might academic writing be related to nonacademic writing? How do writers write in ways that question and probe existing paradigms of "criticism," "theory," "literary" and "cultural journalism," "creative nonfiction," and "journalism"? In what ways might these different kinds of writing inform and overlap one another? How might they conflict or produce creative tension?
Other questions might include: How do academics negotiate the roles of professor and "public intellectual"? How might doctoral programs in the humanities interact or interface with nonfiction creative writing programs? Can the charge that "theory is elitist" be reversed by the clear and straightforward prose of nonfiction writing? Why are journalists and academics, or critics and creative writers, considered antithetical to one another? Other topics could include differences in writing processes; the writers negotiation of voice; travels between genres; the choice of subject and method; where to nest (academia or the media) and where to publish (university or trade press).
I welcome submissions from both faculty members and graduate students who write journalism and nonfiction, as well as writers with an academic background who write full time.
Please send abstracts (250-500 words) by March 20 to: Heather Hewett, 250 W. 22nd, Apt. #5C, NY, NY, 10011. Please include your home mailing addresss, home phone number, and email. Email submissions are also welcome; please send to h.hewett@worldnet.att.net