When Esquire published John Sack's Vietnam War chronicle "M" in October 1966, it was the longest feature in the history of the magazine. A year later, Sack published a follow-up story and then merged the two pieces into a book M is an under-studied work from the New Journalism era. It had a direct influence on Michael Herr and his stories that became Dis-patches. The defining feature of M is Sack's narrative voice, which is ironic and detached. This essay argues that the book shares many of the same features of the Theater of the Absurd. Sack overloads his story with fine-grained detail, hyperbole, inane dialogue, arcane literary and cultural references, and farcical scenes to create what might be called "journalism of the absurd." Asta result M presents readers with an existential_dilemma: how to make sense of the nonsensical. However, because the work is nonfiction, readers must account for the fact that these characters, absurd as they are rendered, are real. They lived, fought, and died in Vietnam. The combination of contingency and absurdity creates a comic estrangement between the reader and M's characters. The effect of this "journalism of the absurd" is that its style renders unreal all the familiar referents that readers might use to orient themselves in the narrative. By confusing the readers' narrative response, Sack illustrates the inexplicability of war.
The journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales (Seville, Andalusia, Spain, 1897-London, U.K., 1944) traveled to Germany in 1933 and published ten articles in the newspaper, Ahora, on "How people live in countries with a fascist regime." Among them were profiles of Nazi Chancellor Adolf Hit-ler and Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. This article analyzes how Chaves Nogales characterized them, alluding to the basic and secondary procedures he used in his chronicles about Germany. The way Chaves No-gales put his ideas on the role of journalism into practice will also be dis-cussed. Through different journalistic genres, Chaves Nogales defined who Hitler and Goebbels were, how they acted, and what could be expected from them
This study employs computational methods to investigate the stylistic and thematic dimensions of ninety-five essays from Australia's Quarterly Essay (QE). Despite the publication's name, many essays share features with literary journalism, including immersive investigation, first-person focaliza-tion, and narrative form. This corpus is compared with ninety-five texts of longform journalism 2012-21, as curated by the online platform Longform. By integrating stylometric analysis, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis, this paper explores the narrative and rhetorical differences between these two corpora. In doing so, it investigates how style, tone, and thematic fo-cus differ between the two corpora using computational tools, and whether there are key stylistic features that contribute to a deeper understanding of the term "literary."
