SOURCE: “Frank Moorhouse and The New Journalism,” in Overland, 1978, pp. 6-14.

In the following essay, Bennett considers the relationship between journalism and literature in Moorhouse's short fiction.

Various attempts have been made by critics and commentators to define “literature” and “journalism”. But there is a broad measure of agreement that a distinction between the two needs to be made. Writers as different in outlook and historical circumstances as T. S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin agree on this issue, though for different reasons. Eliot defines his journalist as a ‘type of mind’ whose best writing is done ‘under the pressure of an immediate occasion’.¹

Benjamin distinguishes between ‘news’ or ‘information’ and ‘literature’, using the story as his epitome of literature:

The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender itself to it completely and...