abstract: This article resituates James Agee and William Evans’s late-modernist experimentalism within the cognitive context that Harvard psychologist William James inaugurated with his focus on brain plasticity and habit in The Principles of Psychology (1890). James’s scientific psychology permeates Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , particularly James’s cognitive account of conversion in Varieties of Religious Experience . An enactivist framework not only reveals the civic commitments implicit in James’s psychology, it also makes visible the ways in which Agee and Evans’s modernist experimental aesthetics represent a vital cognitive form of civic engagement.
Stephanie L. Hawkins (Thu,) studied this question.