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.
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“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
About the Author
Caroline Blinder is in the American Literature Deptment at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of A Self-Made Surrealist: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Work of Henry Miller and has written on the intersections between photography and literature in the work of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Brassaï, Wright Morris, Weegee, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke White, and Alfred Stieglitz, among others.
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