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1991
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Effect of praise Human malesCiter ce document
Catherine Vieilledent, « La représentation de la terre dans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men », Revue Française d'Études Américaines (documents), ID : 10.3406/rfea.1991.1436
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Résumé
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men strikes us as a prototypical act of rebellion against the documentary genre, its sentimental stereotypes and programmatic illustration of human misery. This study centers on the collaboration of picture and text and on how the two media shrink from the documentation of rural tragedy and strive to render the felt complexity of meaning and experience. Both writing and photography are divided by the opposite impulses of clinical distance and projective sympathy and though both start from their avowed role as voyeurs and spies, each medium has yet its own way of defeating the dehumanizing effect of pity (the documentary code) on its human subjects. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in the end can be read as an awkward tribute to representation in an age given to didactic aims and preordained uses.
