New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans : Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Coinciding with the increasing intersections between visual and literary studies, this timely reappraisal of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sheds light on the book's unclassifiable status as part imaginative fiction, documentary effort, ethnographic study, and modernist prose. This timely reappraisal of Walker Evans and James Agee's photo-textual collaboration Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941 focuses on the interdisciplinary aspects of the book. It provides in-depth chapters on the book's status as part imaginative fiction, documentary effort, ethnographic study, confessional writing, and modernist prose. Contributions range from chapters on Walker Evan's photographs and their seminal role in representing the South, material on the journalistic and sociological context for Agee and Evans's collaboration, their personal relationship and more. Taking into account such concepts as psychoanalysis, photography, cinema, ethnography, semiotics, journalism and the South, among other things, these essays constitute a long overdue and important endeavor within American Studies "One early reviewer of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men described it as 'a book that refuses to call itself a book, ' while another in similar spirit compared it to the unclassifiable textual monster that is Melville's Moby-Dick. Blinder's collection of consistently lively and illuminating essays does full justice to the haunting complexity of Agee and Evans's classic volume, issuing an irresistible invitation to revisit this unique mix of hot prose and cool photography."--Peter Nicholls, Professor of English, New York University "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men may be understood as the most interstial of works: awkwardly poised, as it is, between photography and text; high art and journalism; lament and rebuke; religion and sociology; language and its failure; porch and cotton field ... New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans gathers together the very considerable insights of cultural historians, literary and visual scholars, film experts, psychoanalytically persuaded critics and ethnographic readers. As such, read whole and with an eye to its own generative and apt interstices, the collection constitutes the best available guide to Evans and Agee's ongoing arguments."--Richard Godden, Professor of English, University of California-Irvine Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 List of Illustrations......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 12 Introduction......Page 14 1 Ontological Aspects of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Death, Irony, Faulkner......Page 34 2 On the Porch and in the Room: Threshold Moments and Other Ethnographic Tropes in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men......Page 54 3 Walker Evans’s Contrapuntal Design: The Sequences of Photographs in the First and Second Editions of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men......Page 84 4 The Tyranny of Words in the Economy of Abundance: Modernism, Language, and Politics in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men......Page 92 5 Agee, Evans, and the Therapeutic Document: Narrative Neurosis in the Function of Art......Page 118 6 “Two Prickes”: The Colon as Practice......Page 134 7 Animating the Gudgers: On the Problems of a Cinematic Aesthetic in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men......Page 158 Epilogue: Agee and Evans: “On The Porch: 4”......Page 178 Selected Bibliography......Page 188 Contributors......Page 194 Index......Page 198