Authority and Authorship: James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as a Work of Fictocriticism

viii Abstract This thesis uses James Agee's 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to examine the role of so-called fictocriticism in emphasizing the immutability of an author from within a text. The thesis argues that the fictocritical text accounts for the impossibility of extricating the author from writing. Although its precursors date back several centuries- perhaps most notably to Michel de Montaigne-the term fictocriticism was coined in the mid- to late twentieth century to describe texts existing at the interstices of ostensibly fictional and factual genres of writing. Agee's text, borne out of a journalistic assignment for Fortune magazine, blends elements of long-form magazine journalism with lyric poetry with the author's famous sprawling, diaryesque prose, calling the reader to question which elements of the text are rooted in fact and which are simply the author's fabrications or, indeed, whether such a distinction can be drawn. The term can be applied only anachronistically to the 1941 book, yet as defined in these pages it is a befitting description of Agee's otherwise unclassifiable text. Fictocriticism lacks a singular definition, so the examination of Agee's Famous Men as a fictocritical work rests on a thorough revision of the term's history and its lexical implications, both of which..