Lindsey A. Freeman
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781469631677
- eISBN:
- 9781469631691
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469631677.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
Emily Sun
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823232802
- eISBN:
- 9780823241163
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823232802.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Donal Harris
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231177726
- eISBN:
- 9780231541343
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231177726.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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 ...
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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
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.
Stuart Burrows
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816674695
- eISBN:
- 9781452947518
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816674695.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
Walter Benn Michaels
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226210261
- eISBN:
- 9780226210438
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226210438.003.0004
- Subject:
- Art, Art Theory and Criticism
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 ...
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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
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.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846312120
- eISBN:
- 9781846315190
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846315190.010
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Dale Maharidge
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231159319
- eISBN:
- 9780231500586
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231159319.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
David Bordwell
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226352176
- eISBN:
- 9780226352343
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226352343.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
Emily Sun
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823232802
- eISBN:
- 9780823241163
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823232802.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This book investigates Shakespeare's King Lear and its originative power in modern literature with specific attention to the early work of English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and to the American ...
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This book investigates Shakespeare's King Lear and its originative power in modern literature with specific attention to the early work of English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and to the American writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans. It examines how these later readers return to the play to interrogate emphatically the question of the relations between literature and politics in modernity and to initiate in this way their own creative trajectories. King Lear opens up a literary genealogy or history of successors, at the heart and origin of which, the author claims, is a crisis of sovereignty. The tragedy famously begins with the title character's decision to give up his throne and divide the kingdom prior to his demise. In bringing to light the assumptions behind this logic, and in dramatizing its disastrous consequences, the play performs an implicit analysis and critique of sovereignty as the guiding principle of political life and gestures, beyond sovereignty, towards the possibility of a new aesthetic and political future. The question of the relations between literature and politics does not only open up immanently or internally within King Lear, this book argues, but is also that which occasions a literary history of readers who return to the play as to an originary locus for dealing with a problem.Less
This book investigates Shakespeare's King Lear and its originative power in modern literature with specific attention to the early work of English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and to the American writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans. It examines how these later readers return to the play to interrogate emphatically the question of the relations between literature and politics in modernity and to initiate in this way their own creative trajectories. King Lear opens up a literary genealogy or history of successors, at the heart and origin of which, the author claims, is a crisis of sovereignty. The tragedy famously begins with the title character's decision to give up his throne and divide the kingdom prior to his demise. In bringing to light the assumptions behind this logic, and in dramatizing its disastrous consequences, the play performs an implicit analysis and critique of sovereignty as the guiding principle of political life and gestures, beyond sovereignty, towards the possibility of a new aesthetic and political future. The question of the relations between literature and politics does not only open up immanently or internally within King Lear, this book argues, but is also that which occasions a literary history of readers who return to the play as to an originary locus for dealing with a problem.
John Marsh
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- November 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198847731
- eISBN:
- 9780191882425
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198847731.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Scott L. Matthews
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469646459
- eISBN:
- 9781469646473
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469646459.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
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 ...
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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
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.
Chris Coffman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474438094
- eISBN:
- 9781474449694
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474438094.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
“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 ...
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“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
“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.
Nat Segaloff
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813129761
- eISBN:
- 9780813135502
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813129761.003.0012
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
When James Rufus Agee died in the back of a taxicab in 1955, an unfinished semiautobiographical manuscript entitled A Death in the Family, which was about his father, was found on his desk. Agee had ...
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When James Rufus Agee died in the back of a taxicab in 1955, an unfinished semiautobiographical manuscript entitled A Death in the Family, which was about his father, was found on his desk. Agee had given his novel simplicity as he had been known for character-driven screenplays and sharp-edged film criticism. However, since he was not able to finish his novel, there still were several speculations regarding what sort of changes he would have imposed during refining and editing. After it was published in 1957, CBS found the opportunity to create a Playhouse 90 for Fred Coe to produce. Although it won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize, the network shelved it.Less
When James Rufus Agee died in the back of a taxicab in 1955, an unfinished semiautobiographical manuscript entitled A Death in the Family, which was about his father, was found on his desk. Agee had given his novel simplicity as he had been known for character-driven screenplays and sharp-edged film criticism. However, since he was not able to finish his novel, there still were several speculations regarding what sort of changes he would have imposed during refining and editing. After it was published in 1957, CBS found the opportunity to create a Playhouse 90 for Fred Coe to produce. Although it won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize, the network shelved it.
James Kelly
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451683
- eISBN:
- 9780801467653
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451683.003.0013
- Subject:
- Sociology, Occupations, Professions, and Work
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 ...
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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
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.
David Bordwell
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226352176
- eISBN:
- 9780226352343
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226352343.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Four American film critics of the 1940s—Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler—changed the way Hollywood cinema was understood. They also wrote idiosyncratic, multi-flavored prose ...
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Four American film critics of the 1940s—Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler—changed the way Hollywood cinema was understood. They also wrote idiosyncratic, multi-flavored prose that constituted a new kind of arts journalism. This book considers their writing styles, their conceptions of film, their intellectual sources, their quarrels, and their impact on later generations of film writers. Ferguson believed that Hollywood cinema had created a new medium of dynamic, engaging storytelling—one that had a power of arousal found in jazz and swing music. Agee saw Hollywood as a source of poetic revelation beyond what literature could create. Manny Farber considered cinema a form of pictorial art that, in an age praising Abstract Expressionism, could revive supposedly outdated concepts like “illusion” and “illustration.” And Tyler brought a surrealist eye to cinema, discovering in “the Hollywood Hallucination” a repository of wild and piquant fantasies. All asked the reader scrutinize what was on the screen with an intensity not previously seen in popular reviewing. Rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s, these critics had a robust influence on a later generation of film critics, including Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert.Less
Four American film critics of the 1940s—Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler—changed the way Hollywood cinema was understood. They also wrote idiosyncratic, multi-flavored prose that constituted a new kind of arts journalism. This book considers their writing styles, their conceptions of film, their intellectual sources, their quarrels, and their impact on later generations of film writers. Ferguson believed that Hollywood cinema had created a new medium of dynamic, engaging storytelling—one that had a power of arousal found in jazz and swing music. Agee saw Hollywood as a source of poetic revelation beyond what literature could create. Manny Farber considered cinema a form of pictorial art that, in an age praising Abstract Expressionism, could revive supposedly outdated concepts like “illusion” and “illustration.” And Tyler brought a surrealist eye to cinema, discovering in “the Hollywood Hallucination” a repository of wild and piquant fantasies. All asked the reader scrutinize what was on the screen with an intensity not previously seen in popular reviewing. Rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s, these critics had a robust influence on a later generation of film critics, including Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert.
Emily Sun
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823232802
- eISBN:
- 9780823241163
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823232802.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Jeff Jaeckle
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474406550
- eISBN:
- 9781474416146
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474406550.003.0015
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
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 ...
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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
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.
James Kelly
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451683
- eISBN:
- 9780801467653
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451683.003.0014
- Subject:
- Sociology, Occupations, Professions, and Work
This chapter reflects on the ability of nurses to see the “horizon.” It first considers how James Agee conveys the lives of the tenant farmers by description. Agee experiences beauty, dignity, ...
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This chapter reflects on the ability of nurses to see the “horizon.” It first considers how James Agee conveys the lives of the tenant farmers by description. Agee experiences beauty, dignity, complexity but writes about them as things. In nursing you know only what you've seen, and you know best what you've seen before—this is something medicine knows and teaching hospitals institutionalize. Michel de Certeau believes that everyday life could not be represented; there could be no theory of it; it could not be known. This chapter suggests that a border separates nurses from patients and their families, and between medicine and nursing and the ill. It also considers the idea that the horizon “seems to be created by everything there is without being any of them”.Less
This chapter reflects on the ability of nurses to see the “horizon.” It first considers how James Agee conveys the lives of the tenant farmers by description. Agee experiences beauty, dignity, complexity but writes about them as things. In nursing you know only what you've seen, and you know best what you've seen before—this is something medicine knows and teaching hospitals institutionalize. Michel de Certeau believes that everyday life could not be represented; there could be no theory of it; it could not be known. This chapter suggests that a border separates nurses from patients and their families, and between medicine and nursing and the ill. It also considers the idea that the horizon “seems to be created by everything there is without being any of them”.
RAYMOND J. HABERSKI
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813124292
- eISBN:
- 9780813134918
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813124292.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter discusses Bosley Crowther, the only critic during the postwar era who had the power to make or break a picture, especially a foreign film. However, the main legacy of Bosley Crowther was ...
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This chapter discusses Bosley Crowther, the only critic during the postwar era who had the power to make or break a picture, especially a foreign film. However, the main legacy of Bosley Crowther was the two reviews he wrote in 1967, one panning the violent and pretentious Bonnie and Clyde and the other praising the disastrous Cleopatra. This discussion concedes that Crowther's criticism does not have the timeless quality of writers such as James Agee or Pauline Kael. It also stresses that no critic fought as long and hard as Crowther did to free the screen of inordinate restrictions.Less
This chapter discusses Bosley Crowther, the only critic during the postwar era who had the power to make or break a picture, especially a foreign film. However, the main legacy of Bosley Crowther was the two reviews he wrote in 1967, one panning the violent and pretentious Bonnie and Clyde and the other praising the disastrous Cleopatra. This discussion concedes that Crowther's criticism does not have the timeless quality of writers such as James Agee or Pauline Kael. It also stresses that no critic fought as long and hard as Crowther did to free the screen of inordinate restrictions.
David Bordwell
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226352176
- eISBN:
- 9780226352343
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226352343.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
