40Towns
  • Archive
  • Place
  • Theme
  • Index
  • Elsewhere Blog
  • About

Susan Faludi's Brilliant Bait-and-Switch

9/15/2013

0 Comments

 
Literary journalism isn't just you-are-there scenes and dialogue, cinéma vérité in print. The genre ranges widely between narrative and criticism. Susan Faludi, a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist who became famous for her 1991 book on anti-feminism, Backlash, is one of the best of the narrative critics, a fact sometimes overlooked because Backlash was closer to traditional muckraking. The book that followed, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, veered toward narrative, to the point that Faludi's arguments--central to her work, which is polemical in the best sense--were sometime lost. In 2007, she published The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, a work of criticism that drew heavily on her instincts as a narrative writer. 

The same might be said of her latest essay, "Facebook Feminism, Like it Or Not," published in The Baffler. The bulk of the essay is a historical analysis of the way capitalism can co-opt feminism and women's rights movements; it's bookended by two set pieces, the first of which -- an account of a rally led by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, is a strong entry in the long tradition of skeptical reports from religious revivals. Like Mencken in Dayton in 1925, without the snark, like Sarah Comstock marveling over the theatrical power of Aimee Semple Mcpherson in 1927, Faludi gives us the power of Sandberg's presentation even as she reveals what she'll argue is the con. It's bait-and-switch as literary technique, well worth studying.
--Jeff Sharlet
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    ELSEWHERE
    A blog for the editors & writers of 40 towns to note other publications, productions, & people we find invigorating to our practice of the mutant genre we're calling literary journalism.



    Popular Posts

    +"What We Read"
    +"Open Carry"
    +"A Real Find"
    +"What's Happening to All These Great Young Women Writers?"


    Us, in the News

    Seven Days
    Nieman Storyboard
    Longreads
    Valley News
    The Millions
    Vela
    Center for Inquiry
    Dartmouth Now
    Dartbeat
    Dartblog

    Nonfictions

    1966
    The Appendix
    Atavist
    Belt
    Brevity
    Byliner
    The Caravan
    Creative Nonfiction
    Defunct
    Epic
    Found
    Fourth Genre
    Ladyjournos!
    Longform
    Longreads
    Narratively
    Nieman Storyboard

    Nowhere

    River Teeth
    The Riveter
    Seneca Review
    Shadowbox
    Vela
    Wherever

    Audio Documentary

    99% Invisible
    Audiodocumentary
    Hearing Voices
    HowSound
    In the Dark
    The Kitchen Sisters
    The Late Show
    Long Haul
    Love + Radio
    The Moth
    Radiolab
    Radio Diaries
    Snap Judgment
    Sound Portraits
    Soundprint
    The Story
    Third Coast Festival
    This American Life
    Transom

    Documentary Photography

    aCurator
    Burn
    Cowbird
    FSA-OWI
    Harlan Crichton
    i am
    Image, Deconstructed
    Verve

    Documentary Film

    Doc. is Never Neutral
    Folkstreams

    Comics Journalism

    Cartoon Movement
    Cartoon Picayune

    Literary Journals

    American Circus
    Iowa Review
    Georgia Review
    Guernica
    Killing the Buddha
    Lapham's Quarterly
    New England Review
    Orion
    Paris Review
    Tin House
    Virginia Quart. Rvw

    Criticism

    The Baffler
    The Believer
    Bookforum
    Lit. Journalism Studies
    LA Review of Books
    Longform Podcast
    The Millions
    Mutant Journalism
    n+1
    VIDA

    Oddities

    In Between Noise

    Glossy Facts

    Atlantic
    Esquire
    GQ
    Harper's
    Mother Jones 
    New York
    New Yorker
    NYT Magazine
    Rolling Stone
    Texas Monthly
    Vanity Fair

    Local

    The Dartmouth
    Dartmouth English
    Mouth
    Valley News
    Valley Voices

    Further Study

    Cartoon Studies
    Cntr for Doc. Studies
    Columbia Journalism

    Goucher MFA
    Iowa MFA
    UC Irvine
    Minnesota MFA
    NYU Journalism
    Pittsburgh MFA
    Salt Inst. Doc. Studies

    Archives

    April 2019
    February 2015
    June 2014
    March 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013


    Categories

    All
    Audio
    Books
    Image
    Literary Journalism
    Methods
    Periodicals
    Recognitions

    RSS Feed

40 Towns is supported by the Dartmouth College 
English Department Class of '54 Fund.