Gómez Alfaro: Pioneer of Interdisciplinary Studies on the Relationships Between Journalism and Literature in Spain

The article rescues and analyzes the work done in 1960 by Antonio Gómez Alfaro, the first Spanish author that carried out a study on relations between journalism and literature using a multidiscipline perspective. The tradition documents the emergence of comparative approaches at the end of the 1990s, but the revision of Gómez Alfaro’s proposal is an exceptional advance, because this intellectual dealt with the merging of literature and journalism with the assistance of scientific fields that range from literary theory to linguistics and anthropology. This multi-focal approach is extraordinary considering at the time Journalism was not part of the Spanish university system; therefore, there was not a scientific platform nor were there academic precedents that supported in-depth, exhaustive research about journalism and literature, a reality that appeared forty years after the publication of the aforementioned precursor. In order to provide an adequate context to the analysis of Gómez Alfaro’s work, the first part undertakes a historic synthesis from when the discussion about journalism as a literary genre arose in 1845 in the Spanish Real Academia, until the birth of the first scientific theories about literary journalism in the 1980s and 90s