The Ethical Labor of Reading James Agee’s Ekphratic Descriptions

In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), James Agee imitates the camera’s gaze in his prose and declares his medium inferior to photographer Walker Evans’s. Nevertheless, this article proposes that Agee’s text implicitly valorizes literary language as a tool to teach reader-viewers to perceive the visual media of their day more critically. Bridging a body of scholarship that focuses on the text’s ethical and pedagogical aims with one that details its engagement with photography and cinema, this article situates Agee and Evan’s collaboration in contemporaneous as well as more recent debates on the left about the promises and threats of technological reproducibility and the role of modernist technique in engendering media literacy.