Tompkins_Essay

Tompkins Essay In “The Tradition: Fact and Fiction,” Robert Coles says that “in shaping an article or book, the writer can add factors and variables in two directions: social and cultural and historical on one hand, individual, individual or idiosyncratic on the other” ( Coles 177 ). In other words, historians, filmmakers, or documentarians are endowed to blend this so- called tradition of “fact and fiction” to create something real in “an attempt to engage, represent, and understand the lives of others. In his essay, Coles provides examples of work that is social, cultural, and historical. After all, his goal as a documentarian was to grasp an understanding of white culture facing adversity at its highest. The photographs of the “migrant mother” is a perfect example of ways in which artists can manipulate reality by adding special factors and variables. The contrast in backdrop moves the viewer from a narrow and broad scope of grief to a solid sense of sadness of an individual faces. Let alone, her eyes and expression speak for themselves in a state of deprivation. The children hide in a shy manner, as if they don’t exist, in order to emphasize coles, individual, mother, migrant, idiosyncratic, fiction, factors, cultural, writing, work, viewer, variables, state, something, social, shy, scope, life, historical, example, culture, course, children, book, blend, addition, writer’s, writer, words, white, whatever, ways, way, views, upon