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“Fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth”: Object-Oriented Lists in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
- Journal of Modern Literature
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 45, Number 3, Spring 2022
- pp. 140-154
- 10.2979/jmodelite.45.3.10
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
New insights emerge when James Agee’s Depression-era epic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is considered through the lens of Object-Oriented Ontology. Both OOO and Agee’s text cultivate an ethical disposition that manifests itself as a sustained and even compulsive attention to cataloguing everyday objects. Despite Agee’s distinctly human-centered approach to the material world—an orientation that OOO would reject as anthropocentrist—reading this text alongside this philosophy reveals the ethical potential of the list as an ideologically powerful form.