“Fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth”: Object-Oriented Lists in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Abstract

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.