Good riddance

Sooooo---yes, I handed in my dissertation (April 5, 2:57 pm). Please excuse me for copying-and-pasting, but here comes an English summary - for your information.

Writers Who Make a Scene. Spectacular Personal Reportage in Denmark Today as Patterned on the Work of Günter Wallraff and Hunter S. Thompson. PhD dissertation submitted to the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication: Division of Rhetoric, University of Copenhagen, Denmark ∙ April, 2006.

Through a striking and consistent rhetorical practice, the German writer and social critic Günter Wallraff (1942-) and American writer and journalist Hunter S. Thompson (USA, 1937-2005) have each established their own personal brand of written journalistic reportage, namely wallraffing (role reporting) and gonzo journalism. Both are frequently imitated by colleagues all over the world, though oftentimes in a reductive fashion which turns on the negative positioning of the writer as being simply an alternative to a staid ‘mainstream’. They present themselves as more subjective, sensitive, audacious and creative than the rest. This dissertation argues for establishing spectacular personal reportage as a subgenre based on wallraffing and gonzo as rhetorical patterns which include a common ethos based on a belief in the individual (and revealed) rhetorical agency of the reporter. Through close readings (with Leff (2003) as a major point of reference) of texts by Wallraff and Thompson alongside texts by some of their prominent Danish successors (Michael Elsborg, Allan Nagel, Mads Brügger, Jakob S. Boeskov, Morten Sabroe, Claus Beck-Nielsen, Michael Jeppesen, and Flemming Chr. Nielsen), the dissertation highlights a number of rhetorical pitfalls regarding the writer’s presentation of self and enactment of agency. Generally, however, an argument is made for recognizing this subgenre as a potential stronghold for rhetorical agency in the print media. More specifically (with reference to Sheard (1996)), the texts are read as performances of critical and mediatory epideictic work-in-progress. Each writer sets out to experimentally establish some common ground between the social situation in the field on the one hand and the rhetorical situation on the other. They seek, sometimes almost desperately, to affirm and exemplify basic standards of journalism or human interaction, in a substandard world. Typically the reporters therefore willfully challenge their own standards, by bringing themselves into tricky or even dangerous situations (cf. readings in Chapter III: Handling Weapons in Writing) where they grabble with the question of what kind of (journalistic) truths to pursue (cf. readings in Chapter IV: Handling the Truth in Writing) and finally make interaction and negotiation with other people, including the reader, the focus of concern (Chapter V: Handling Other People in Writing). The adoption and adaption of the epideitic role becomes a critical, unusually physical and precious process as rhetorical momentum must be created more or less from scratch. In some texts the quest for common ground or matters worth celebrating simply fails, and in others a rhetorically iconoclastic approach is required before any epideictic celebration can begin.
The dissertation is written in Danish as a contribution to the debate within professional journalism, journalism studies, and rhetorical studies in Scandinavia regarding the question of personal and admitted perspectives versus disguised or corporate ones and, moreover, to enable and qualify the practice of spectacular personal reporting in the Scandinavian languages in the future.