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

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.Ontological Aspects of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men : Death, Irony, Faulkner; M.Gidley On the Porch and in the Room: Threshold Moments and Other Ethnographic Tropes in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; J.Dorst Walker Evans's Fictions of the South; A.Trachtenberg The Tyranny of Words in the Economy of Abundance: Modernism, Language, and Politics in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; S.Currell? Agee, Evans, and the Therapeutic Document: Narrative Neurosis in the Function of Art; P.Hansom Two Prickes: The Colon as Practice; P.Rabinowitz Animating the Gudgers: On the Problems of a Cinematic Aesthetic in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; C.Blinder

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 tl£ˆ