Mediating the Real: Self-Reflection in Recent American Reportage

As a literary genre, the nonfictional reportage has particular implications for the role of the writer. Pascal Sigg shows how six U.S. American writers, including David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, reflect on themselves as human media in their reportage. The writers assert themselves in a postmodern way by scrutinizing their own mediation. As it also traces and develops the theorization of reportage as genre along the reporters’ early concerns with technical media, this pioneering contribution to literary journalism studies paves a way for a new materialist approach in the under-researched field.

Pascal Sigg, born in 1983, works as a journalist in Switzerland covering media, technology and democracy for various outlets. He studied English, German and comparative literature at the Universities of Bern and Zurich where he finalized his doctoral dissertation in 2024. He was a visiting researcher at Boston College in 2018 and holds a BA in Journalism and Communication from the Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften.