Verklighetens språk : Verklighetseffekt och journalistiska influenser i Tom Wolfes A Man in Full

Sammanfattning: Tom Wolfe was a founding father of New Journalism, revolutionizing journalistic reporting by introducing literary tools of storytelling. The literary influence on New Journalism is well-covered by journalism scholars, but Wolfe was also a fiction writer, and as such he actively tried to rally his generation of fiction writers behind him for a New Social Novel, more grounded in reality and reporting. His post-postmodern novels also amalgamate journalism and literature, but how and to what extent journalism influenced his fiction writing is a story yet untold.  Wolfe provided a normative blueprint for how to achieve verisimilitude in fiction, in his literary manifesto: “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”. At about the same time, he started writing the novel A Man in Full. Using A Man in Full as an application of his ideas of the ideal novel, this thesis investigates how Wolfe constructed the reality effect in his fiction and foregrounds the origins of Tom Wolfe’s literary voice, focusing on onomatopoetic language, statuspheric minutiae, expressive punctuation, and Wolfe’s characteristic wake-the-dead prose style. I argue that Wolfe did reinvent verisimilitude in literary realism, but not in the way that he intended, through reporting and status details, but rather through language.