Paula Rabinowitz

Voyeurism and Class Consciousness: James Agee and Walker Evans, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"

f one takes Barthes at his word, then all the comfortable categories by which we have theorized gender, history, and representation-such as the capitalist separation of the spheres of production and reproduction, the public and domestic, masculine and feminine, disappear at the very moment of their inception. By bringing the images of daily life and ordinary people into public view, photography remakes vision and in so doing produces (or reproduces) new forms of (class) consciousness.

“Two Prickes”: The Colon as Practice

All over Alabama, the lamps are out. So it begins—if that is really what you can call it after dozens of photographs and pages of verse and prose have already accumulated around this famous gesture. An opening, a beginning that inaugurates itself through closure, the day is shutting down—“the house had now descended”—and the two men, the “two prickes,”1 (We lay on the front porch)

Class Ventriloquism: Women’s Letters, Lectures, Lyrics—and Love

In his introduction to Down & Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man, historian Robert S. McElvaine remarks on the difficulty of gleaning a sense of life among the downtrodden during the 1930s because “the sources of traditional history—governmental records, organization files, collections of personal papers, diaries, memoirs, newspapers—yield only spotty information.”1 As a historian McElvaine echoes poet Muriel Rukeyser’s assertion, “There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.”2 In order to retrieve the buried and lost, he argues, and obtain “such immediate testimony” one might “examine letters written to public figures during the 1930s[:] The words of men, women, and children as they described their problems to persons they believed to be concerned” (McElvaine, 3). Lorena Hickok attributed the unprecedented number of letters personally addressed to President Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor to his weekly radio addresses and Fireside Chats, during which he encouraged listeners to write to him, as he often referenced letters received and answered by his staff. Listening to the voice of the president or his wife over the radio was a new experience for the vast majority of working people in the United States.