150047 SE Interpretationsseminar: Baogao Wenxue: Reading reportage literature as political history (2014S)

Chinese reportage has been defined as "a new genre of narrative that cuts across the conventional borders between fiction and journalism, fiction and history, and fiction and politics", a "deliberately literary nonfiction text that narrates or describes a current event, person, or social phenomenon" or, in other words, a "fast and timely representation, with adequate artistic processing, of real people and real events that are drawn directly from and regarded as typical of the real life". While on the one hand it was seen as a "mouthpiece for official Party policy" before 1979, it became a "form to circumvent the strictures of journalism in the post-Mao Zedong era". The seminar focuses on reportage from the 1980s when this genre was highly popular as part of the intellectual discourse in the first decade of reform an opening.