This thesis explores the autobiographical fiction of James Agee from the perspective ofKohut's self psychology and shame studies. Chapter One provides an outline of these psychological theories and draws connections between Kohut's narcissistic personality disorder and shame, makes reference to other scholars such as Joseph Adamson, J. Brooks Bouson and Barbara Ann Schapiro who have employed these theories with such effectiveness to other authors, and discusses Agee within these contexts. Chapter Two focuses on A Death in the Family and examines how Agee's autobiographical persona suffers from a narcissistic injury and excessive shame that precedes his father's death, and explores how other family members suffer from similar disturbances. Chapter Three examines Agee's first novel, The Morning Watch, and - discusses the shame dynamics that underlie Agee's ambiguous presentation ofreligion. Chapter Four explores Agee's short autobiographical fiction from the 1940's and discusses how Agee' s response to the modem world plays an integral role in his examination of the self and interpersonal conflicts. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This report examines maximalist voice in the nonfiction work of James Agee, Lester Bangs, and David Foster Wallace. The term maximalist voice is meant to capture a set of authorial strategies for depicting a vast, complex American reality with an equally complex literary style, one that is simultaneously didactic, chaotic, and intimate. In particular, this report examines Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Bangs’s Psychotic Reactions and Carburator Dung, and Wallace’s Consider the Lobster. In using “voice” as an analytic lens, this report highlight those qualities of the three author’s nonfiction writing that draw upon the particular conventions of oral communication. It concludes by arguing for increased use of voice as a way to analyze literary writing. / text

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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...

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