Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Edited by William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College A Routledge Series 94992-Humphries 1_24.indd 1 1/25/2006 4:42:08 PM Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory William E. Cain, General Editor Vital Contact Negotiating Copyright Downclassing Journeys in American Literature Authorship and the Discourse of from Herman Melville to Richard Wright Literary Property Rights in Patrick Chura Nineteenth-Century America Martin T. Buinicki Cosmopolitan Fictions Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the “Foreign Bodies” Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Trauma, Corporeality, and Textuality in Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee Contemporary American Culture Katherine Stanton Laura Di Prete Outsider Citizens Overheard Voices The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern Beauvoir, and Baldwin American Poetry Sarah Relyea Ann Keniston An Ethics of Becoming Museum Mediations Configurations of Feminine Subjectivity in Jane Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot American Poetry Sonjeong Cho Barbara K. Fischer Narrative Desire and Historical The Politics of Melancholy from Reparations Spenser to Milton A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie Adam H. Kitzes Tim S. Gauthier Urban Revelations Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern Images of Ruin in the American City, The (Hi)Story of a Difficult Relationship from 1790–1860 Romanticism to Postmodernism Donald J. McNutt Will Slocombe Postmodernism and Its Others Depression Glass The Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, Documentary Photography and the Medium and Don DeLillo of the Camera Eye in Charles Reznikoff, Jeffrey Ebbesen George Oppen, and William Carlos Williams Monique Claire Vescia Different Dispatches Journalism in American Modernist Prose Fatal News David T. Humphries Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature Katherine E. Ellison 94992-Humphries 1_24.indd 2 1/25/2006 4:42:08 PM Different Dispatches Journalism in American Modernist Prose David T. Humphries I~ ~~o~!!~n~~;up LONDON AND NEW YORK 94992-Humphries 1_24.indd 3 1/25/2006 4:42:08 PM RT76758_Discl.fm Page 1 Wednesday, January 25, 2006 10:04 AM First published 2006 by Routledge Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2006 Taylor & Francis ISBN-13: 978-0-415-97675-6 (hbk) The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Catalog record is available from the Library of Congress Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at informa http://www.taylorandfrancis.com Taylor & Francis Group and the Routledge Web site at is the Academic Division of Informa plc. http://www.routledge-ny.com For Karine Castillo 94992-Humphries 1_24.indd 5 1/25/2006 4:42:08 PM 94992-Humphries 1_24.indd 6 1/25/2006 4:42:08 PM Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction The Sound of Foxes, the Voice of the Community 1 Chapter One The Journalist, the Immigrant, and Willa Cather’s Popular Modernism 13 Chapter Two Sherwood Anderson’s Imagined Communities 49 Chapter Three The Camera Eye and Reporter’s Conscience in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises 83 Chapter Four Divided Identities, Desiring Reporters in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men and James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 125 Chapter Five Reporting on the New Dawn of Cold-War Culture in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men 171 Notes 205 Works Cited 227 Index 241 vii 94992-Humphries 1_24.indd 7 1/25/2006 4:42:08 PM 94992-Humphries 1_24.indd 8 1/25/2006 4:42:08 PM Acknowledgments I would like to offer my sincere thanks to Professors Joan Richardson, Wil- liam Kelly, and Morris Dickstein of The City University of New York Gradu- ate School and University Center for their guidance in helping me shape this work as a dissertation. I am indebted to their wisdom and grateful for their generosity and encouragement. I would also like to thank Max Novick at Routledge for his help in preparing this manuscript and Professor William E. Cain, general editor of this series. To all my family and friends, I express my gratitude for your support, and I thank especially Terence Brennan, who was there at the very beginning, and Duncan Faherty, who reviewed drafts of chapters long after the obligations of friendship had been exhausted. Though I have Karine Castillo to thank for many things, I would like to thank her most of all for her patience as I completed this book. For permission to quote the following materials, I would like to acknowledge the following sources: “The ‘Real’ Collective in New Deal Doc- umentary and Ethnography: The Federal Writers’ Project, the Farm Security Administration, Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men and James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Copyright 1997 by Son- net H. Retman and cited with the permission of the author. “Novel Work: Theater and Journalism in the Writing of Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather.” Copyright 2001 by Nicole H. Parisier and cited with the permission of the author. “New Dawn.” Copyright 1997 by the Estate of Robert Penn Warren. Reprinted by permission of William Morris Agency, LLC on behalf of the Author. This work was supported in part by a grant from The City University of New York PSC-CUNY Research Award Program. ix 94992-Humphries 1_31.indd 9 1/31/2006 3:39:03 PM 94992-Humphries 1_24.indd 10 1/25/2006 4:42:09 PM Introduction The Sound of Foxes, the Voice of the Community Near the end of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), James Agee describes how he—or more precisely, his retrospectively constructed narrator- reporter—sits on a tenant farmer’s porch and becomes captivated by what he takes to be the cries of foxes. Speculating on what this sound might mean, he describes it as “beyond even the illusion of full apprehension” and declares it to be “a work of great, private, and unambiguous art which was irrelevant to audience” (466). In a sense, Agee’s comments about this sound reflect his own aspirations for his text. In transforming an assignment for a popular magazine, Fortune, into the often perplexing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee surpassed the expectations of his employer and his likely readers and turned a journalistic, possibly even touristic, account of poverty into a difficult, expansive text that seemingly rejects a broad public in favor of private meditations on consciousness and art. Likewise, Agee suggests that the most unambiguous feature of art is, paradoxically, the very ambiguity of a particular work, as is the case with the sound of these foxes. Seen in more general terms, the private reflections of his reporter are made meaningful by the public role of journalism, and it is the elements of journalism within the text that point that to the broader cultural significance of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Far from writing a work irrelevant to audience, Agee often struggled with his conception of his audience through the long and particularly difficult process of composing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and rather than suggesting a private work, the individual identity of his reporter and his seemingly private reflections actually reflect some of the most pressing public issues of the time. After he and Walker Evans spent roughly six weeks living with a group of tenant farmers in Alabama in 1936, Agee worked on the book over a number of years and frequently questioned how to address his writing to members of the educated upper- and middle-class, who like 1 94992-Humphries 1_24.indd 1 1/25/2006 4:42:09 PM 2 Different Dispatches himself, were unable to comprehend the poverty of such farmers. At other times, he wondered whether his intended audience should not actually con- sist of impoverished people like the uneducated tenant farmers themselves (Letters to Flye 114–115). These questions reflect the different, sometimes divergent, strands of Agee’s own background. In continuing to reach out to the tenant farmers, he draws upon his previous work as a journalist and his own southern roots; in challenging his more literate and literary audience, he draws upon his Harvard education, literary aspirations, and eclectic reading. In the end, Agee’s “private” book was published by a major press, Houghton Mifflin, despite its confrontational stance towards middle-class complacency and the conventions of documentary reportage, and Agee, while addressing specific passages in the text to members of the tenant fami- lies, never sent any of them a copy of the book or even made them aware of its existence (Maharidge and Williamson 85). Even after Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published, Agee seems to have been unsure of exactly who should comprise his ideal audience. Though Agee was ultimately unable to reconcile his conflicting goals for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his struggles remain a key feature of the text and help to explain the terms by which it was produced and the ways it signifies in larger networks of production and communication. An impor- tant clue for understanding Agee’s approach to these tensions is found in a request he made to his publisher that the book be printed on newsprint (Bergreen 243–244). Printing the book on newsprint would have allowed Agee to address his literary aspirations and the sense of obligation he felt towards his subjects and his own southern childhood.

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