It’s a new semester and a new old class we’ve just embarked on, Literary Journalism and American Belief. It’s old because I’ve taught the class once before, but it’s new because the class this time has expanded a great deal. Our main text for the course is Jeff Sharlet’s Radiant Truths, which covers religious journalism from Whitman to Francine Prose. Discussion today centered on Sharlet’s introduction to the book, an essay he published at Killing the Buddha called “This Mutant Genre.” And we covered the gamut: from the basic definitions of literary journalism, to the debates over embellishing facts in the name of “art” (John D’Agata got good play here), to who reads this stuff anyway?,

As supplemental reading, I’m recommending my students read Josh Roiland’s argument for the term “literary journalism,” “By Any Other Name,” published last spring in Literary Journalism Studies.