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James Agee and the Southern Superreal

Lindsey A. Freeman

in Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk

Southern superrealism is not yet a canonized art movement, nor is it a social science. It has no self-appointed leaders or manifestos, no museum retrospectives, no scholarly journals, and it has not ... More

Southern superrealism is not yet a canonized art movement, nor is it a social science. It has no self-appointed leaders or manifestos, no museum retrospectives, no scholarly journals, and it has not been established as a field of literature—at least not yet. This essay begins to imagine such a field, starting with the writer James Agee and his wild, ethnographically tinged works of fiction and nonfiction.Less

From the Division of Labor to the Discovery of the Common: James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Emily Sun

in Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has been reissued several times, appearing in 2005 as a volume in the prestigious Library of America series. It turned out to not to be the work the editors at Fortune ... More

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has been reissued several times, appearing in 2005 as a volume in the prestigious Library of America series. It turned out to not to be the work the editors at Fortune had envisioned. It is a book that consists of two parts. It moves from the experience of shame to the possibility of praise. Praise is what the book in its rather unwieldy title proposes to do. In terms of formal conventions, it did not resemble any of its predecessors or peers in social documentary. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men moves musically toward the improvisation of a language for “us” that is in excess of established convention or procedure. It creates the conditions for a praise that demands for its success or felicity a response in kind from you, the reader.Less

On the Clock: Rewriting Literary Work at Time Inc.

Donal Harris

in On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines

Time Inc., at one time the largest media conglomerate in the world, invented the “poet-reporter” by strategically hiring modernist authors to develop its uniformly stylish periodical voice. In ... More

Time Inc., at one time the largest media conglomerate in the world, invented the “poet-reporter” by strategically hiring modernist authors to develop its uniformly stylish periodical voice. In different ways James Agee's and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock formalize the felt erasure between personal writing and salaried corporate work that accompanies their jobs in a corporate media company.Less

The Power of What Is Not There: James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Stuart Burrows

in On Writing with Photography

This chapter talks about James Agee’s photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a study that focused on three “sharecropper” families in Alabama. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men translates into words the ... More

This chapter talks about James Agee’s photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a study that focused on three “sharecropper” families in Alabama. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men translates into words the economy and simplicity of Walker Evan’s photographs, which featured local expressions of people found in unusual locations and portrayed the American scene from the 1920s to the early 1970s. The chapter concludes with an emphasis on Agee’s view of the unequal relation between writing and photography, claiming that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men would have been better if the book only compiled photographs with no writing at all.Less

The Art of Inequality: Then and Now

Walter Benn Michaels

in The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy

The “then” part of this chapter compares the social order of the world imagined by the photographs of August Sander with those imagined by James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ... More

The “then” part of this chapter compares the social order of the world imagined by the photographs of August Sander with those imagined by James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and argues that they present two fundamentally different accounts on inequality as injustice. Sander imagines a world in which injustice consists of excluding people or depriving them of their proper place, and justice consists above all in recognizing that place. Evans and Agee imagine a world (emblemized most vividly in their own inevitably adversarial relation with their subjects) that is organized by a class antagonism that makes the effort of inclusiveness at best irrelevant and at worst reactionary. The “now” part reads the work of the photographer Liz Deschenes as structured by a contradictory but revelatory engagement with both models.Less

James Agee: All There and Primed to Go Off

David Bordwell

in The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture

A poet and novelist, Agee brought a literary sensibility to film journalism. His Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an unorthodox piece of reportage, had brought him some notice, but his reviews for THE ... More

A poet and novelist, Agee brought a literary sensibility to film journalism. His Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an unorthodox piece of reportage, had brought him some notice, but his reviews for THE NATION and, anonymously, for TIME made him widely read. An irrepressible Romantic, Agee looked to cinema for poetic epiphanies. Like his peers, he concentrated on details of presentation, hoping to find there a moment of emotional revelation. Almost morbidly self-aware, he also dramatized in his reviews the difficulty—intellectual and ethical—of arriving at a fair judgment of even a minor movie. Sometimes derided for his equivocations, he is treated here as a serious thinker who presented himself as supersensitive to every aspect of a film, or of everyday life.Less

Documentary of the 1930s

in Cinematic Fictions: The Impact of the Cinema on the American Novel up to World War II

This chapter discusses the incorporation of documentary techniques in writing of the thirties. It examines the work of Eudora Welty, a writer who cross-applied photographic and cinematic methods in ... More

This chapter discusses the incorporation of documentary techniques in writing of the thirties. It examines the work of Eudora Welty, a writer who cross-applied photographic and cinematic methods in her fiction; Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing (1935), a novel about Depression America told in the present tense; two documentaries by John Dos Passos, which were produced to support the democratic front in the Spanish Civil War – Spain in Flames (1937) and The Spanish Earth (1937); the documentary You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a collaboration between the Southern novelist Erskine Caldwell and the Fortune photographer Margaret Bourke-White; and James Agee, one of the most famous documentary authors of this period, whose works combined interest in film, photography, fiction, and reportage.Less

James Agee’s: Let us Now Praise Famous Men

Dale Maharidge

in Second Read: Writers Look Back at Classic Works of Reportage

This essay reviews the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), by James Agee and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men explores the daily lives of Alabama sharecroppers during the Great ... More

This essay reviews the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), by James Agee and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men explores the daily lives of Alabama sharecroppers during the Great Depression. Agee affects those who read him. For Jimmy Carter, the impact of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men seemed to be moral and religious. For Tad Mosel, Agee's presence was supernatural. Mosel's 1961 Pulitzer-winning play, All the Way Home, was adapted from Agee's posthumously published novel, A Death in the Family. Agee literally informs And Their Children After Them (1989), the book in which Dale Maharidge and the photographer Michael Williamson documented the lives of the survivors and descendants of the three families with whom Agee lived in Alabama. Agee was also a strong influence on the New Journalism of the 1960s.Less

Protesting the Privilege of Perception: Resistance to Documentary Work in Hale County, Alabama, 1900–2010

Scott L. Matthews

in Capturing the South: Imagining America's Most Documented Region

This chapter explores how Hale County, Alabama became an iconic site of documentary representation during the twentieth century and why some its poor black and white residents resisted the attempts ... More

This chapter explores how Hale County, Alabama became an iconic site of documentary representation during the twentieth century and why some its poor black and white residents resisted the attempts of documentarians to turn their private lives into public symbols. The chapter begins by examining the collaboration between two local white documentarians, amateur folklorist and poet, Martha Young and photographer J.W. Otts, who recorded the lives and customs of Hale County’s rural black people in the early 1900s. It focuses on Young’s dialect poems that speak from the perspective of black women who refused to be photographed by whites and who saw photography as an exploitative medium. Next, the chapter demonstrates how this narrative and tradition of resistance to documentary continued during the 1930s. It explores the resistance writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans faced in the 1930s from some of the white tenant families they documented for their book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and it shows how their descendants often found new ways to resist documentarians and journalists in succeeding decades. These acts of resistance transformed poor black and white residents into actors rather than just icons in the documentary process.Less

Dalí’s Montaigne: Essay Hybrids and Surrealist Practice

Christy Wampole

in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present

This chapter analyses the hybridization of the essay with visual genres such as illustration, photography, film, and video, an emergent tendency throughout the twentieth century that underscores the ... More

This chapter analyses the hybridization of the essay with visual genres such as illustration, photography, film, and video, an emergent tendency throughout the twentieth century that underscores the shared features of essayism and Surrealism. These include the use of a logic of digression and free association, a focus on the inner life of the self, the dismissal of formal strictures, the deployment of sensory perception, memory, intuition, and imagination towards expressive ends, and the reliance on images. Beginning with Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Montaigne’s Essays (1947), the chapter then turns to James Agee and Walker Evans’ collaborative photo essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Chris Marker’s essay-film Sans soleil (1982), and John Bresland’s video essay Mangoes (2010) in order to pinpoint the shared affinities between essayism and Surrealism.Less

Photography and the Development of Radical Poetics: Langston Hughes in Haiti, Mexico, Alabama

Sarah Ehlers

in Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics

This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s overlooked archive of photographs and scrapbooks from his 1931 trip to Haiti, arguing that Hughes’s photographic encounter with Haiti is part of the ... More

This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s overlooked archive of photographs and scrapbooks from his 1931 trip to Haiti, arguing that Hughes’s photographic encounter with Haiti is part of the construction of a transnational vision that starts in the Caribbean and moves through the U.S. South and Mexico. Photography becomes fundamental to Hughes’s attempts to map the connectedness of persons and locales in a capitalist world system and to imagine the formation of political communities. The chapter begins by considering how Hughes’s experience of taking photographs, along with organizing them in albums and scrapbooks, generated questions about the politics of representation in his subsequent political poems. The chapter then extends these considerations to Hughes’s interwar radical verse, showing how Hughes’s encounters with visual objects continue to influence his poetry during the 1930s. The chapter closes by demonstrating how Hughes’s contemplation of the relationship between photography and writing opens up new readings of James Agee and Walker Evans’s foundational documentary text, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Hughes’s engagements with photography place him in a developing documentary modernist tradition that pushes beyond New Deal initiatives and employs documentary in the shaping of an international public sphere.Less

Awe: Toward a Depression Sublime

John Marsh

in The Emotional Life of the Great Depression

By awe, philosophers and psychologists mean the sensation that overcomes someone in the presence of something simultaneously vast, powerful, and, when compared to humans, strangely humbling. The ... More

By awe, philosophers and psychologists mean the sensation that overcomes someone in the presence of something simultaneously vast, powerful, and, when compared to humans, strangely humbling. The chapter begins with a review of amazing discoveries such as island universes, the expanding universe, and the Big Bang that altered the understanding of the universe and made the solar system “seem but a speck of dust in infinite space.” It then turns to other sources of awe, or the Depression sublime: the Empire State Building; Jesse Owens’s record-setting long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; the moral heroism of the Joads in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; and James Agee and Walker Evans’s deification of tenant farmers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Whereas most accounts of the sublime involve the vastness of nature overwhelming human beings, during the Depression human beings themselves became a source of the sublime.Less

Seeing Stein’s Masculinity

Chris Coffman

in Gertrude Stein's Transmasculinity

“Seeing Stein’s Masculinity” analyses the shifting significance of visual images of and written texts about Stein. Driven by recent reinterpretations of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze, this ... More

“Seeing Stein’s Masculinity” analyses the shifting significance of visual images of and written texts about Stein. Driven by recent reinterpretations of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze, this chapter reads his theories against the grain to counter arguments about the visual that reproduce binary thinking about gender. Queering his account of the gaze makes it possible to register the expanded array of masculinities mobilized in photographs of Stein by George Platt Lynes, Henri Manuel, and Man Ray as well as in their recent reception during the 2011 Seeing Gertrude Stein exhibit in San Francisco. Moreover, Stein’s own comments in The Autobiography about being photographed by Man Ray queer the heteronormative gaze that drives James Agee’s review of that book in the September 11, 1933 issue of Time whose cover featured Lynes’s image of Stein in profile. Tracking changes that have taken place between the early twentieth century and the present in attitudes toward her queer sexuality and masculinity, this chapter argues that traces of abjection remain in contemporary reactions to Stein despite greater acceptance of her gender, sexuality, and innovative writing.Less

Leaving Ends the Love

James Kelly

in Where Night Is Day: The World of the ICU

This chapter considers nursing as a kind of love, one that ends when the patients leave; in other words, leaving ends the love. Focusing on James Agee's book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it reflects ... More

This chapter considers nursing as a kind of love, one that ends when the patients leave; in other words, leaving ends the love. Focusing on James Agee's book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it reflects on what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is about three families on a hill, and their experiences are vividly captured by photographer Walker Evans. Agee writes about the difficulty of conveying the “dignity of actuality”; through his photographs, Evans shows the farmers and their children to be serious and dignified, complex and strong. The chapter concludes by discussing Alastair Campbell's views about what he calls moderated love, the kind of love offered by the caring professions, and especially his argument that we shouldn't think of doctors as gods or nurses as angels, and neither as heroes; instead, we should think of medicine as brotherly love, and nursing as companionship.Less

Introduction

Emily Sun

in Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics

This book investigates Shakespeare's King Lear and its originative force in modern literature, with specific attention to the early work of the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and to James ... More

This book investigates Shakespeare's King Lear and its originative force in modern literature, with specific attention to the early work of the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and to James Agee and Walker Evans's 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This book aims to reinterpret the relations between Shakespeare and modern literary history by examining how King Lear generates a literary genealogy, or history of successors. It seeks to explore the relevance of the history to the question of the relationship between literature and politics in modernity. Shakespeare occupies a place of incontestable centrality in Western modernity. His work has been studied in a variety of disciplines, including — besides literary study — philosophy, history, political theory, religion, sociology, and psychology, plumbed for the insights it affords into the predicament of being modern.Less

Introduction: An Agile Mind—The Many Stands of Preston Sturges

Jeff Jaeckle

in Refocus: the Films of Preston Sturges

This chapter challenges the reining views of Sturges as an ambivalent figure torn between art and commerce, especially as promulgated in popular writings by James Agee; instead, the chapter proposes ... More

This chapter challenges the reining views of Sturges as an ambivalent figure torn between art and commerce, especially as promulgated in popular writings by James Agee; instead, the chapter proposes new descriptive clusters or patterns that cut across every aspect of the filmmaker’s life: creator, businessman, wordsmith, skeptic, and optimist. These terms provide a good sense of the personality, vitality, and talents that made Sturges such a compelling figure, with the first three speaking to his aptitudes and endeavours, and the latter two characterizing his attitudes and worldview. Rather than set these terms in opposition, the chapter puts them in conversation to illustrate the complexities of Sturges’s remarkable life and to shed light on why he was, and continues to be, such a pivotal figure in Hollywood cinema and American culture.Less

The Rhapsodes

David Bordwell

in The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture

Four major American critics of the 1940s brought a new verve to film criticism. Writers for large-circulation intellectual weeklies, they were able to propose vigorous new ideas about American ... More

Four major American critics of the 1940s brought a new verve to film criticism. Writers for large-circulation intellectual weeklies, they were able to propose vigorous new ideas about American cinema. They achieved these by a close attention to the details of acting, staging, lighting, editing, and other creative dimensions. Just as important, they attracted readers with vivacious, sometimes wildly unorthodox prose styles. Fresh twists of grammar, unexpected word choice, and every resource of rhetoric, from hyperbole to understatement, were eagerly taken up by critics who were, in several ways, opposed to the literary establishment ruled by more temperate and judicious (hence boring) arbiters of taste.Less

Afterlives

David Bordwell

in The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture

This chapter traces the heritage of the four critics across the years up to the 1980s. Ferguson, the earliest of the critics considered, was the last to be rediscovered, after celebrity criticism of ... More

This chapter traces the heritage of the four critics across the years up to the 1980s. Ferguson, the earliest of the critics considered, was the last to be rediscovered, after celebrity criticism of the Kael-Sarris variety took over film reviewing. Agee’s collection, AGEE ON FILM, was the first major collection of a critic’s writing and, because he won the Pulitzer prize posthumously for A DEATH IN THE FAMILY, the anthology garnered enormous praise. It led other critics to collect their reviews as well. Manny Farber created his own collection, strategically selecting items to create a certain persona for himself—one based on his more arcane 1960s writings for film and art journals. Parker Tyler wrote prolifically about non-Hollywood film (chiefly foreign cinema and avant-garde film) and returned only to Hollywood movies to point out that the sexual subtexts he had revealed had come to the surface, rather blatantly. The same period revealed a growing awareness that these critics had been pioneers in arts journalism, and that the new trends owed a great deal to them.Less