The Language of Vision

Photography and Southern Literature in the 1930s and After

Joseph R. Millichap

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780807162774
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807162798
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Language of Vision celebrates and interprets the complementary expressions of photography and literature in the South. Southern imagery and text affect one another, explains Joseph R. Millichap, as intertextual languages and influential visions. Focusing on the 1930s, and including significant works both before and after this preeminent decade, Millichap uncovers fascinating convergences between mediums, particularly in the interplay of documentary realism and subjective modernism.
Millichap's subjects range from William Faulkner's fiction, perhaps the best representation of literary and graphic tensions of the period, and the work of other major figures like Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty to specific novels, including Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Fleshing out historical and cultural background as well as critical and theoretical context, Millichap shows how these texts echo and inform the visual medium to reveal personal insights and cultural meanings. Warren's fictions and poems, Millichap argues, redefine literary and graphic tensions throughout the late twentieth century; Welty's narratives and photographs reinterpret gender, race, and class; and Ellison's analysis of race in segregated America draws from contemporary photography. Millichap also traces these themes and visions in Natasha Trethewey's contemporary poetry and prose, revealing how the resonances of these artistic and historical developments extend into the new century. This groundbreaking study reads southern literature across time through the prism of photography, offering a brilliant formulation of the dialectic art forms.

INDEX

Note: page numbers followed by “n” indicate endnotes.

“1. A woman of the ‘thirties/Hinds County/1935” (Welty), 90

“1. King Cotton, 1907” (Trethewey), 128

“2. Food, Shelter, and Clothing” (Agee), 38

“2. Glyph, Aberdeen 1913” (Trethewey), 128–29

“3. Flood” (Trethewey), 129–30, 147n6

“3. Help, 1968” (Trethewey), 131

“4. You Are Late” (Trethewey), 130

12 Million Black Voices (Wright), 103, 144n3, 146n11

“82. Jackson/1930s” (Welty), 91–92

Abel, Elizabeth, 136n23

Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 12, 21, 52–53, 55, 61

“Ad Astra” (Faulkner), 48, 69

African Americans and depictions of race: in antebellum era, 9–10

by black photographers, 25

Ellison’s Invisible Man and, 101, 104, 105–12

Ellison’s portraits of black males, 104

Faulkner and, 51, 61–62

by Genthe, 14

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee), 39, 139n8

lynchings, 14, 134n9

Trethewey and, 120–21, 129–30

visual and psychological binaries of, 2

Welty and, 89–92

Agassiz, Louis, 9

Agee, James: Bergreen’s James Agee: A Life, 137n1

Cotton Tenants, 138n6

Crane and, 30

A Death in the Family, 139n9

Evans and, 7, 30–34

Evans’s “James Agee in 1936,” 139n7

Madden and, 3

Permit Me Voyage, 29

photography, interest in, 28

on photography, 19

posthumous reputation of, 114

self-doubt of, 31

Trethewey and, 128, 132

Walker and, 7

Warren and, 68. See also Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee)

Allen, Frederick Lewis, 135n11

Allen, James, 134n9

Allison, Dorothy, 115

“All the Dead Pilots” (Faulkner), 48

All the King’s Men (Warren), 75–77, 78, 83, 141nn3–4

Altitudes and Extensions (Warren), 81–82

America and the Daguerreotype (Wood), 133n2

American Photographs (Evans), 35–37, 131

“The Americans” (Trethewey), 131

The Americans (Frank), 131, 148n7

Anderson, Sherwood, 135n15

And Their Children After Them (Maharidge and Williamson), 32–33

Arbus, Diane, 79

As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 48–49, 61, 139n13

Atget, Eugene, 14

At Heaven’s Gate (Warren), 74–75

“At the Owl Club, North Gulfport, Mississippi, 1950” (Trethewey), 119

Audubon: A Vision (Warren), 117

“August 1911” (Trethewey), 123–24

Baldwin, James, 114

Band of Angels (Warren), 78

“Barn Burning” (Faulkner), 69

Barthes, Roland: Civil War photography and, 11

Stannard on, 9

on studium and punctum of the photograph, 5, 70, 118

on time, death, and memory, 4–5, 41, 47, 99

Trethewey and, 118

Warren and, 70, 76, 79. See also time, death, and memory

Bearden, Romare, 146n10

Beattie, Ann, 115

Bellocq, E. J., 14, 120, 124, 147n4

“Bellocq” (Trethewey), 123

Bellocq’s Ophelia (Trethewey), 117–18, 120–25, 132

Berger, Martin A., 136n23

Bergreen, Laurence, 137n1

Beyond Katrina (Trethewey), 117, 119, 132, 147n6

“Black Saturday” (Welty), 84, 88, 89, 92, 143n8

Blair, Sara, 102, 145n7

“Blond” (Trethewey), 126

Bourke-White, Margaret: Agee on, 40

You Have Seen Their Faces (Caldwell and Bourke-White), 19, 40, 70

Bradley, Adam, 112

Bradley, David, 144n3

Brady, Mathew, 11–12, 40

The Bride of the Innisfallen (Welty), 94, 99, 143n9

The Bridge (Crane), 30

Brooks, Cleanth, 16

Bubley, Esther, 86

Burdine, Jane Rule, 26

Burroughs, Floyd, 42–43

Butler, Maud, 46

Cable, George Washington, 13–14

Caldwell, Erskine: Agee compared to, 19

photo books and, 33

You Have Seen Their Faces (Caldwell and Bourke-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• One The Language of Vision in Photography and Southern Literature
• Two James Agee, Photography, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
• Three William Faulkner, Photography, and the Dialectic of the 1930s
• Four Robert Penn Warren, Photography, and Southern Letters
• Five Eudora Welty, Photography, and Southern Narratives
• Six Ralph Ellison, Photography, and Invisible Man
• Seven Photography and Southern Literature in a New Century
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index