Who Reads an American Book?

The Transformation of Authorship in America/Grantland S. Rice

Rice explores the different views of authorship in America and the changes these views underwent starting with the Puritans and how the idea of authorship changed over time.  Rice first focuses on the effects of Puritanism in New England, especially concerning their tight control of the press, forcing writers who disagreed or went against the Puritans to publish their work abroad.  Not only was there an attempt to tightly control what was printed in New England, but faithful Puritans were also encouraged to publicize their personal opinions on matters of the government.  Rice argues that the result of the tight censorship of the New England government, and the strong idealism and Puritan political theories that were presented, was that authorship was not individual, but rather representative of the opinions and ideas of a particular group. 

 The Enlightenment gathered speed and freedom of press became more important globally and Rice focuses on one particular instance in American history that is said to have brought freedom of press to America, the trial of John Peter Zenger.  Rice suggests that the Zenger case reveals how people were able to monopolize rhetoric in order to gain their own ends.  Therefore, freedom of press and civic criticism actually can present a threat to democracy and participatory politics.  As authorship narrows there is more freedom in publishing, but people are also writing for personal gain as well. 

Rice moves on to explores the causes and effects of the Federal Copyright Act of 1790.  This act sought to protect the work of the author and to allow it to circulate while remaining "his".  While many people argued for this right, some, such as Washington Irving, disliked the idea of literary property, which transformed a "public and political activity into one that was private and productive" (7).  The rise of the novel is also an important aspect which seems to result from the Copyright Act.

Rice argues that the rise of the novel, beginning with the early seduction novels, rose as a rhetorical effect of the persistence of civic writing.  With the rise of the novel, there was also an evasion of claiming authorship of the novels.  

Rice claims that the free press established a move from classical republican liberty and the right of the individual to participate in politics to the right of individuals to act out of self-interest and secure property without restraint.  In this manner, writing becomes more economic than political.  Rice compares himself with Habermas because he follows what he claims to be the gradual replacement of a political understanding of authorship with an economic understanding of authorship in which writing is used for personal interest instead of the interest of a larger group of people.

Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, & the Culture of Performance/ Jay Fliegelman

 

I want to lay out the section headers because they seem to quietly elaborate on what I cannot, especially knowing that I will likely miss something. I primarily focused on a few sections rather than on the book as a whole.

Jefferson’s Pauses   Agency and the Invention of Responsibility

The Elocutionary Revolution Dialectical Words

Soft Compulsion Plagiarism, and Authorship, and Improvement

Harmonies: Homer, Fugues, and Chairs The Oratorical Ideal, Racial Politics, and the Natural Theatricality     Making of Americans    

The Figure of Patrick Henry

Social Leveling and Stage Freight

Private Lives and Public Scrutiny

 

In the first few sections of his book, Declaring Independence, Jay Fliegelman exposes Jefferson’s aversion to oration as well as his tendency toward musical and poetic devices in his writing that perhaps enabled him to more comfortably deliver his addresses. The introduction presents terms such as Jefferson’s ‘lost world,’ which, in this case, Fliegelman describes as the “lost world of eighteenth-century theories and practices of rhetoric, the…art of persuasive communication that prescribed the…character of public speaking in England and America” (1).  The next phrase he defines is ‘elocutionary revolution’ – the period when “a new language was composed not of words themselves, but of the tones, gestures, and expressive countenance with which a speaker delivered those words” (2). In section one, Jefferson’s Pauses, Fliegelman (hereafter deemed ‘F.’) discusses the particular marks that show up throughout Jefferson’s writings, namely “the Declaration,” as F. refers to it, and his essay “Thoughts on Prosody,” (7). F. claims that these are not pauses for breath or punctuation, but rather “rhythmical pauses of emphatical stress that divide the piece into units comparable to musical bars or poetic lines” (10). On page 11 F. lays out an example of a passage from the Declaration that Jefferson originally intended – single pauses (the / ) indicate one breath of silence while a new line signals two breaths.

    in every stage / of these oppressions

    we have petitioned for redress / in the most humble terms;

    our repeated petitions / have been answered only by repeated injuries.

    a prince whose character is thus marked / by every act which may define a tyrant,

    is unfit to be the ruler / of a free people who mean to be free.

    future ages will scarce believe / that the hardiness of one man

    adventured within the short compass / of twelve years to build

    a foundation / so broad and undisguised,

    for tyranny

By incorporating such pauses Jefferson makes “a crucial link between oratory and music, which…is also distributed by phrase, demi-phrase and measures” (14). F. argues that like playing a musical instrument, oration incorporates the self, “private feelings” as he calls it, while simultaneously insisting on “conformity to the social and musical etiquette of measured regularity and an articulation of the character and conventions of common speech” (15). In this way the process allows for the opportunity of inciting emotions through certain breaks which inevitably emphasized the words around them, giving the listener more time to focus on the words and phrases in degrees rather than absorbing the whole.

The “elocutionary revolution” of the eighteenth century was structured by the movement away from rhetoric as trope. It moved toward a revitalized rhetoric of persuasion in an effort to re-establish the classical qualifications of a rhetoric that moved and influenced men “galvanizing their passions, interests, biases, and temperament” (29).  Rhetoric was not meant to “suppress” men’s passions through instruction as Francois Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambray declared (28), but to incite them to action through persuasion and facts.  F. describes rhetoric as an appeal to emotions with facts through “natural persuasion,” and being less about “ceremonial” or eloquent and ornamental arguments (29).

In Soft Compulsion F. goes on to emphasize the characteristics of oratory that most efficiently persuaded the population, determining that the senses are more “excited by powerful delivery than by rational thought” (36). He says that:

    Increasingly it signified an oratorical ability, not merely to persuade by rational argumentation, but to excite, animate, motivate, and impress. Those verbs must be understood according to the period’s sensationalist view of knowledge as a set of extrapolations from sense events, of action as produced by the power of the single strongest motive, and of the human mind and heart as impressionable instruments whose psychological natures…could best be played upon by sound, looks, and gestures. (36)

Plagiarism, Authorship, and Improvement discusses how Jefferson was accused of plagiarizing everything from congressional minutes to “the so-called Mecklenburg Declaration…written by a group of North Carolinian citizens on May 20, 1975” (164). F. uses this instance to explain how folks now associated “authorship with originality and the novelty of thought,” with individuality rather than with “one’s social nature” (165). Jefferson maintained the “Declaration…as an expression of the American mind” (165). However, if originality did not lay in the “language or ideas” of the Declaration, then certainly it is evident in the manner and character of presentation and the form of composition. “Jefferson, in one particular reader’s view, had succeeded in giving voice to the new oratorical ideal on paper, if not in person, in composition, if not in reading,” signifying the movement into “a new theatrical era in political rhetoric” (187).

 

Road Trip?

An actual production of The Contrast?

Who wants to go?

Possibly useful

For the second half of the class. Details here. Have a good break!

Midterm Sample

Midterm Sample/Clarification
My meetings on paper topics revealed more misunderstandings of the midterm than I would have expected. 
Here is the text of the assignment, again:
As a springboard in this direction, your midterm will be takehome: 3-4 pages about one of the secondary articles, an article it cites, and an article that cites it. You should offer a paragraph précis of each article, and provide an analysis of the engagement of the one article with the other, and an argument about the conversation that takes place. Ideally, this is the conversation you will enter in your final paper.   As I explained, one or more of the articles can be a book.

Here is an example of the kind of thing I have in mind. Bruce Burgett, “The History of X in Early America” Early American Literature  44:1 (January 2009) pp. 215-225.

Cites Block, Sharon, and Kathleen M. Brown, eds. “Sexuality in Early America.” Special issue of The William and Mary Quarterly 60.1 (January 2003).

*Block & Brown’s introduction,  Sharon Block and Ruth Brown, “Clio in Search of Eros: Redefining Sexualities in Early America” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 60, No. 1,   (Jan., 2003), pp. 5-12. Cites Edmund S. Morgan, "The Puritans and Sex," New England Quarterly, 15 (1942), p. 591-607.  

If I were doing the assignment, I’d summarize each separately, and then discuss the relationship among the three works, making an argument about the conversation they are in, and thus entering the conversation myself. You should begin your paper like a review essay, with full bibliographical citations for your three articles/books.  Here are the articles, for your review:
Download Burgett
Download Block and Brown
Download Morgan

*This is a bit of a wrinkle, b/c Burgett cites the whole issue, not a specific article.

The Puritan Origins of the American Self, Sacvan Bercovitch

In the first chapter (Puritanism and the Self) of his book Bercovitch explores the formation of the Puritan mindset – the break of the Reformation from the Catholic view, basically the leap of focus from identity of the institution to that of the individual: “whereas the Reformed biographies leap from the individual to the universal, the Catholic hagiographies begin and end with the extraordinary and the unique.” (pg. 8) He talks about the Catholic view of saints (“they impress us not as models for emulation but as objects of veneration” pg. 8) as opposed to the Protestant view of the imitatio Christi, which did not center on miracles or the extraordinary, but rather on the exemplum fidei – faith; “a mode of imitatio that emphasized the spirit rather than the letter of the deed.” (pg 9) All this he links to Cotton Mather’s biography of John Winthrop, “Nehemias Americanus” – he brings up the links within the biography between “the literal event, scriptural parallel and christic referent” (pg. 33), which are further emphasis on the individual – universal mindset the Reformation began and thus, the difference from the “extraordinary and the unique” Catholic hagiographies – by describing Winthrop’s life, giving frequent biblical parallels and finally comparing Winthrop to Christ he shows that this “pattern applies, like the life of Christ, both to the individual and to the church at large.” (pg. 33)

In the second chapter, The Vision of History, Bercovitch discusses Mather’s vision of Winthrop as the “Nehemias Americanus” – Winthrop’s role as another Nehemiah (who led the Israelites from Babylon to the promised land), but an American one – “the idea of the exemplary American.” (pg. 35) He further explores Mather’s usage of biblical references in regards to Winthrop, but emphasizes Mather’s placement of Winthrop in a specific historical time and place – he mentions the “American Jerusalem” or substituting New England for “Jerusalem”. Bercovitch also points out the problem with the “Nehemias Americanus” – the fact that it places Winthrop as “at once for citizen and saint, state and church, New England and ecclesiastical history, res Americana and res Christi.” (pg. 44)

In the third chapter, The Elect Nation in New England, Bercovitch further explores Mather’s “Americanus” – the fact that this “enhances the sacred referent (Christ, Nehemiah) within a special historical context.” (pg. 72) – a new saint for the new chosen and elect people on the new hill. This he links to the colonists’ belief that New England and the whole continent was the “city upon the hill” – “a status of visible sainthood.” (pg. 108) This, in turn, Bercovitch links to the idea of the American self and identity – “the link between the New England and the American Way” (pg. 108) and differentiates it from the way European countries look at themselves – “British homeland, German fatherland” as opposed to “American dream, manifest destiny, redeemer nation, and, fundamentally, the American self as representative of universal rebirth.” (pg. 108)

The fourth and fifth chapters, From Hermeneutics to Symbolism and The Myth of America, Bercovitch further relates the Puritan mind to the formation of the American self, the American way – the myth of America. He says that “the Puritan myth prepared for the re-vision of God’s Country from the “New England of the type” into the United States of America.” (pg. 136) He states that Mather’s continual references to himself as an American as well as calling Winthrop “Americanus” further amplifies the projection of the Puritan mind onto the New World – it is not secularization, but rather projection of the idea of the city upon the hill, of utopia, onto New England and thus, America as a whole and finally, the United States of America. Bercovitch also points out the difference of this from the other colonists, who viewed the New World mostly as a commercial venture, as Europeans venturing into a new territory – which Bercovitch says the other colonies never truly cast away, whereas the Puritans “conceived of the American paradise as the fulfillment of scripture prophecy.” (pg. 137)

Ned Ward Redux

These posts a friend does for Yahoo seem to have some Ned Ward in their DNA:
A trip to LSU.
A trip to Clemson.