College essays:  Agee’s style

admin @ December 18, 2007

College essays:   Agee’s style is sometimes called "baroque"; critics have often found his syntax and vocabulary dense, mannered, even "tortured." Certainly his inversions of word order, the intricate syntax of some of his clauses, and his occasionally unorthodox punctuation make careful reading imperative; Agee himself cautions that the reader will have to listen carefully to his prose. But the effects of this are to draw attention to the prose as a thing composed, constructed; thus the reader is discouraged from seeing the writing merely as a transparent "screen" through which to read the world, and encouraged to see it as a reconstruction of the original experience — perhaps a problematic one at that. Although one reviewer of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men doubted Agee’s ability to write a clear sentence, Agee had certainly developed a range of styles from which to choose. Much of his writing, here and in his journalism, displays a simple, more "transparent" style, one in which verbs do more of the work and prepositions less. In such "straightforward" passages, however, Agee often makes heavy use of figures of speech to mark the experience as distinctly his.
College essays:  the critical reception of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has been varied. Reviewers both praised and criticized its variety and stylistic innovations; some found Agee’s tour de force "dazzling," brilliant in its very failure to satisfy conventional expectations, "a distinguished failure," while others thought it self-indulgent and self-important. Commercially the book was not a success, but it did attract a certain following among the literary establishment after Lionel Trilling’s favorable review in 1942. It was not until its reissue in 1960 that it began to gain in popularity and influence; it was embraced by young activists eager for social reform, and had a particular impact among practitioners of New Journalism, who, like Agee, questioned the possibility of objectivity, favored recreations of personal experiences, and pushed their craft to stylistic extremes.

College essays:  of Agee’s other nonfiction, the journalistic pieces he wrote for Fortune reveal flashes of the style and voice of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but the articles are, for the most part, journalism rather than essays; he allows himself (or his editors allow him) no reflective excursions from the facts at hand. One exception to this is "Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes" ( Collected Short Prose, 1968); tellingly, the piece was never published by Fortune, for whom he was working at the time. the film reviews he wrote for Time and the Nation are more essayistic in their occasional meditations on art, philosophy, and the American culture of the day. Much of Agee’s fiction is autobiographical; the novel A Death in the Family ( 1957) drew so heavily on his childhood experiences that at least one reviewer called it a memoir, and two of the early stories anthologized in the Collected Short Prose, "Death in the Desert" and "They That Sow in Sorrow Shall Reap," both feature the intercutting of narrated experience and reflection characteristic of the essay, as well as being stories which, according to editor Robert Fitzgerald, were based on real occurrences.

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