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

by C. Blinder (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230102927
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	09/10/2010
Edition description:	2010
Pages:	191
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

CAROLINE BLINDER is Lecturer in English and American Literature at Goldsmiths College at the University of London, UK.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction Caroline Blinder 1

1 Ontological Aspects of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Death, Irony, Faulkner Mick Gidley 21

2 On the Porch and in the Room: Threshold Moments and Other Ethnographic Tropes in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men John Dorst 41

3 Walker Evans's Contrapuntal Design: The Sequences of Photographs in the First and Second Editions of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Alan Trachtenberg 71

4 The Tyranny of Words in the Economy of Abundance: Modernism, Language, and Politics in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Sue Currell 79

5 Agee, Evans, and the Therapeutic Document: Narrative Neurosis in the Function of Art Paul Hansom 105

6 "Two Prickes": The Colon as Practice Paula Rabinowitz 121

7 Animating the Gudgers: On the Problems of a Cinematic Aesthetic in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Caroline Blinder 145

Epilogue Agee and Evans: "On The Porch: 4" William Stott 165

Selected Bibliography 175

Contributors 181

Index 185

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher