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MCC Daily Tribune

Dean Mike Jacobs To Present at Filling Station: A Faculty Research Presentation Series, March 16

Save the date! On March 16, 12-12:50PM, in 8-200, Dean Mike Jacobs will present at the second Filling Station event of the semester. For his presentation, Mike will discuss his work with James Agee's and Walker Evans's seminal, Depression era text-and-picture book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Drawing on both the poetics and humanist ambitions of the so-called high modernists, Famous Men seeks to represent faithfully the lives of Alabama tenant farmers--"an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings." In abandoning the conventional journalistic forms of their day, which often sought to sensationalize and commodify the poor, Agee and Evans succeeded in documenting "the uncapturable beauties of existence."

Before serving as Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at MCC, Dr. Michael Jacobs was Chair of English at Berkeley College in New York City and founding Director of the Consortium for Critical Reading, Writing, and Thinking. Dr. Jacobs's research examines the influence of literary modernism on documentary journalism--as well as how comparable sociopolitical conditions in the U.S. during the Great Depression and Vietnam War Era gave rise to equally comparable surges in the production and quality of works that cross over the borders of literature and journalism. His most recent publications include "Confronting the (Un)Reality of Pranksterdom: Tom Wolfe and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (published in Literary Journalism Studies) and "From Cotton Pickin' to Acid Droppin': James Agee and the New Journalism" (featured in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75: Anniversary Essays--Univ. of Tennessee Press).

Anthony Leuzzi
English/Philosophy
03/06/2018