Custom essays on Agee, James American
admin @ January 7, 2008
Custom essays: Although James Agee produced journalism, review essays, and short nonfiction pieces throughout his career, his reputation as an essayist derives primarily from his book with Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ( 1941), a long study in prose and photographs of the lives of three Southern sharecropper families. Agee both documents the lives of his human subjects — families with whom he and Evans lived during the summer of 1936 — and reflects on the problems of documenting without either inventing or concealing. Because Agee confronts the philosophical problems of truth-telling so directly in this work, because he enacts these problems stylistically, and perhaps above all because these have been critical, recurring questions for the essay throughout the genre’s history, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men holds great interest for students of the essay, as well as a place of increasing importance in the canon of 20th-century American literature.
Custom essays: For Agee, as for Montaigne, the essay was not a form for conveying a whole and universal truth clearly perceived; on the contrary, it was useful for highlighting both the partiality of any one observer’s vision and the great difficulties involved in perceiving the world and communicating one’s experience of it to an audience. A form of truth is possible, says Agee, if one is as faithful as possible to one’s own knowledge and experience of the world, but it will, of course, be at best a relative truth. Moreover, it is no simple thing to confront that world in an immediate way, "without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands"; to do so an observer must strip his or her consciousness until it stands "weaponless" before its subject.
Custom essays: This confrontation of two existents, observer and subject, is crucial to Agee’s understanding and use of the nonfiction essay form because the meaning of his real, human subjects does not derive from the writer’s work (as it does in fiction); both the subject and the writer’s writing about this subject have their meaning in the fact that subject and writer both exist. Thus the essayist’s responsibility is not to "art" but to that experience, the confrontation of living people. The essay is a form that Agee uses to reveal himself as a "spy," one with the specific goals of observing, recording, and exposing the lives of these families. He uses the reflective, questioning, and self-revealing aspects of the essayistic persona to give voice to the moral and ethical problems of his position — that of an anxious, indignant, and sensitive person, alive to his subjects and at times agonizingly self-conscious about what he is doing.
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