Word: stott
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...doctor has come down with the disease; the historian has fallen prey to the shortsight that he attributed to his subjects. Stott's chronicle is infected with the type of superficial thinking and weak-minded analysis that an overemphasis on "authenticity" and the "universality" of feelings created in the culture of the thirties...
...Stott's answers do not turn out to be edifying or particularly helpful. They boil down to a few obvious and obviously simplistic statements, distinguishing between "factual" and "human" documents. The latter are those that "inform our feelings" and educate us about society in the only "authentic" possible way. Stott could have used his introductory chapters more fruitfully by examining the social pressures and political concerns and attachments that influenced the work he goes on to chronicle. As it is, we hardly know at times where Stott's appraisals end and the thirties' self-appraisals begin...
...point in his account Stott claims that the "documentary imagination" by informing the feelings of Americans "held together a social order rapidly disintegrating." Such arguments are more or less typical of Stott's attempts to link documentary expression to the social issues and conflicts of the thirties. And they reveal very little besides Stott's susceptibility to the period's self-congratulations...
Virtually all of the material which Stott examines was produced by members of a privileged middle class for others of the upper and middle classes about people belonging to the lowest rungs of the class at the bottom. Yet none of them except Agee and a few others wrote as though he or she were particularly aware that "solidarity with the oppressed" involved anything more painstaking than the simple and straightforward feelings that presumably animated one's writing and that one shared with one's friends and cohorts...
Perhaps by pursuing some of the ramifications of simple social facts like this Stott might have provided a more serious understanding of the social context of documentary expression. If one sets out to chronicle and make plain the subtle interplay between a culture and a society, one takes on the additional burden of developing a theoretical framework, a structure of ideas and insights, that is adequate...