Between Fiction and the 'Greater Truth' - Representation and Reality in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: A+, Victoria University of Wellington (School of English, Film and Theatre der Faculty of Humanities and Social Science), course: ENGL439 - Journalism And Literature, language: English, abstract: A close reading of Tome Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test considering Wolfe's concept of New Journalism as a form of writing between the novel and journalism. |
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Common terms and phrases
Acid Test actually aesthetic American approach approximated argument basically become behaviour Billion-Footed Beast carried central Chandler chapter characters claims concept concerning context convention create discussion especially essay establishing ethical experience facts fiction figure form of representation function genre greater truth higher Ibid ideas imagination important incorporated individual inherent instances interest interpretation involvement Johnson Journalism journalistic Kesey Kesey’s kind language less literary literature Marvel comic material matter means mental metaphor narrative narrator novelistic observations perspective picture point-of-view portrayal possible Prankster experience Pranksters present produce properties pure question reader reasons referred reflected reported represent role scene seems sense shared simple social realist novel society starting status story Strange structure subjective reality techniques TEKAAT theory transcended turn ultimately understanding Weber whole Wolfe Wolfe’s world of experience writing
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Page 14 - HAVE TRIED NOT ONLY TO tell what the Pranksters did but to re-create the mental atmosphere or subjective reality of it.
Page 7 - ... Journalism is not secured by any means. In some quarters the contempt for it is boundless . . . even breathtaking. . . . With any luck at all the new genre will never be sanctified, never be exalted, never given a theology. I probably shouldn't even go around talking it up the way I have in this piece. All I meant to say when I started out was that the New Journalism can no longer be ignored in an artistic sense. The rest I take back. . . . The hell with it. ... Let chaos reign . . . louder music,...
Page 8 - In fact, realism is just another formal device, not a permanent method for dealing with experience." I suspect that precisely the opposite is true. If our friends the cognitive psychologists ever reach the point of knowing for sure, I think they will tell us something on this order: the introduction of realism into literature by people like Richardson, Fielding and Smollett was like the introduction of electricity into machine technology. It was not just another device. It raised the state of the...
Page 7 - instinct" rather than theory, journalists began to discover the devices that gave the realistic novel its unique power, variously known as its "immediacy," its "concrete reality," its "emotional involvement," its "gripping" or "absorbing
Page 6 - ... a bunch of slick-magazine and Sunday-supplement writers with no literary credentials whatsoever in most cases — only they're using all the techniques of the novelists, even the most sophisticated ones — and on top of that they're helping themselves to the insights of the men of letters while they're at it — and at the same time they're still doing their low-life legwork, their "digging...
Page 21 - There is also a lot about games. The straight world outside, it seems, is made up of millions of people involved, trapped, in games they aren't even aware of.
Page 9 - ... about the psychedelic, or hippie, movement, and I had begun to indulge in some brave speculations about nonfiction as an art form. These were eventually recorded in a book called The New Journalism. Off the record, however, alone in my little apartment on East Fifty-eighth Street, I was worried that somebody out there was writing a big realistic fictional novel about the hippie experience that would blow The Electric KoolAid Acid Test out of the water. Somebody? There might be droves of them....
Page 7 - ... digging," their hustling, their damnable Locker Room Genre reporting — they're taking on all of these roles at the same time — in other words, they're ignoring literary class lines that have been almost a century in the making.
Page 19 - Following a profound new experience, providing a new illumination of the world, the founder, a highly charismatic person, begins enlisting disciples. These followers become an informally but closely knit association, bound together by the new experience, whose nature the founder has revealed and interpreted. The...