No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
REVIEWS Ruttenburg, Nancy. Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial ofAmerican Authorship. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998. 538 pp. Cloth: $65.00. Paper: $19.95. In her study of a phenomenon she calls nonliberal "democratic personality ," Nancy Ruttenburg seeks to account for "the cultural work of the inarticulate " (7). This project is difficult for two reasons, first because prevailing among scholars are familiar notions of democracy derived from the texts and accomplishments of "remarkable individuals" (7). Ruttenburg questions these notions, declaring that by hearkening to "the characteristic voice of democratic personality—unanticipated, inarticulate, uncontainable, heedless of the forms, ventriloquizing a higher will and truth" (6)—we can discover a liminal "generative site" where "the sacred and the profane, essence and appearance, being and representation" collapse and then collect themselves into a "variant of constructed subjectivity" (10, 11). Second, inarticulateness would seem, by its very nature, to be impossible to manifest. Ruttenburg aims to restore voices to a population which, though illiterate, nevertheless gave "public utterance [to] a new and unanswerable epistemology," one that both questions and enhances traditional "claims for representational legitimacy" (7). Re-historicizing texts ranging from commentary on the Salem witch trials to Billy Budd, Ruttenburg seeks above all to explicate the "spectral presence " of voices which, though anonymous and marginal, either complete or supplement "the development of a recognizably democratic (polycentric) cultural semiotic" (15). Along the way, Ruttenburg explores concepts like the "semiotics of authenticity," the "ontology of representation," and the "aesthetic ofinnocence" to elucidate the emergence of a democratic voice lurking on the outside, gaining strength, and inexorably challenging the centers of power. She argues that a "radical reconceptualization of human personality" originated in Salem, when the stability, authority, and legitimacy ofrepresentation were shattered by the revelations of "witches" and their victims; and that this change "laid the conceptual groundwork for the formation of 'democratic personality' in the Great Awakening and into the revolutionary era, as it provided a paradigm for the production of an 'innocent' national literature in the antebellum era" (37). Ruttenburg'sjourney from the "epistemological limitations " of Puritan binarism (51) to the "verbal strabismus" (368) aboard the Bellipotent is long, demanding, sometimes obscure, and often thrilling. Over the course of five hundred dense pages, Ruttenburg supports her thesis with research that is no less than breathtaking. The patient reader will be edified by her close, and unique, reading of what transpired in Salem, which shows her at her best. She employs archival material with nimble mastery , citing the testimony of both famous and forgotten "actors [who] con- 246Reviews spired to replace the theoretically managed uncertainties of Puritan semiosis with a less centralized and wholly unmanageable war of representations between visible character and the spectral self (74). By locating the genesis of democratic personality in Salem, where long-standing assumptions about the reliability of self-evident truth were not so much challenged as annihilated, Ruttenberg reconfigures our sense ofhow the trials altered forever the nation's view of identity, representation, and transcendence. The saga of democratic personality continues in Ruttenburg's study of Whitefield' s evangelism and his era of "spectacular conversion." These chapters pivot on a fascinating analysis of the crisis ofrepresentation embodied by Whitefield and other New Light ministers whose powers of speech bypassed the intervention of Old Light preachers and their systems of representation. Whitefield's "preeminently evangelical logic ofuncontainability" (97) aroused the ire of authorities threatened by his vast appeal to and influence on inarticulate masses. Ruttenburg argues convincingly that semiotic authenticity and ecclesiastical authority shifted dramatically during the Great Awakening. Ruttenburg next turns to fiction, focusing on Brockden Brown's Wieland, a novel possessing a "shock value" that "derives from the realization that democratic space is coextensive with the fictional domain itself (261, Ruttenburg' s italics). Here Ruttenburg begins to strain for greater effects and claims, and her abstract style occasionally works against her. For example, about Clara Wieland Ruttenburg writes, "We may say provisionally, then, that Clara's refutation of literary antinomianism—here enacted if not articulated —ensures the possibility of literary narrative" (249), the kind of statement that strikes me as asking too much of a fictional character. A phrase like "semiotics ofredeemed Christian character" (210) is...
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.