Word: stott
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...What Stott illustrates is that for most social scientists in the thirties the plight of the poor became an occasion for sentiment. The ubiquitous appearance of middle class values and virtues in the case histories of "representative" men and families among the unemployed characterized a type of superficial "consensus" social science that effaced individuality and sacrificed real insight for the sake of reassurance. The sharp empirical texture and psychological insight gained by participant observation were often undermined by the brittle emotions that academic writers indulged in. Compassions degenerated into pity, and sentiments became substitute for the tough-minded social analysis...
These criticisms are not limited to Stott's discussion of the academics. Sentimentality, self-indulgence and a fundamentally exploitative relation to subject matter constitute the salient elements in his critiques of all aspects of the documentary movement...
...achievement lies precisely here. Applying a humanist's moral and critical standards across the board. Stott breaks through the usual boundaries of literary and artistic studies. He insists on judging the work of journalists, the popular media and the rhetoric of politicians by standards that are normally reserved for more respectable cultural performances...
UNFORTUNATELY, EVEN AN enlarged and responsible vision of humanistic studies may have serious shortsights. When Stott runs up against the interface of thirties culture and thirties society and the bridges between them that he set out to erect, he falls short. Stott's assessment of documentary expression remains primarily an aesthetic one. For all its decency and moral content, it offers us no handles with which to grasp the relationship between the cultural movement and the society in which it flourished...
...problem lies in Stott's own strategy and design. He begins his book with four untypically tedious and redundant chapters that attempt to define "What Is Documentary" and "What Documentary Treats...