THE
REVIEW OF
COMMUNICATION
1 (2001):
148-150
© 2001 National
Communication Association
American Declarations, Rhetorical History, and the Limits of
Thematic Criticism
Stephen Hartnett
Harold K. Bush, Jr. American
Declarations: Rebellion and Repentance in American Cultural History. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1999. xiii +224 pages. $19.95.
Weaving together Old Testament notions of
repentance and Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts, American
Declarations examines nine case studies of what Harold Bush, Jr.,
calls “metanoia.” Quoting
Charles Colson, Bush defines metanoia as “the essential manifestation
of regeneration that sets us straight in our relationship to God and so
radically alters our perspective that we begin to see the world through
God’s eyes. . . . [It is] the ultimate surrender of self.”
Paradoxically, this “surrender of self” to God (or nation) is
also frequently enacted though a rebellious declaration of independence
that reconstitutes a new self. Bush
denotes this dialectic of surrendering-selves and declaring-selves in
the phrase “in/dependence.” Thus
spinning metanoia in political, cultural, and theological directions,
Bush reads the various declarations of “in/dependence” in his case
studies as examples of Americans dissenting courageously from the
national culture, and hence, in so doing, of reinvigorating both their
sense of self and their commitment to the nation’s founding
principles. American
Declarations is accordingly a tale of religious and political
conversions in which rebellion becomes repentance, declared independence
becomes implicit dependence, and individuals rejecting communities
become cherished icons embodying communities.
The scope of this thesis is ambitiously broad, as
Bush offers chapters on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass,
Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, and Robert Frost.
And while the theoretical heart races at the prospect of finding
shared rhetorical and political threads linking these cultural heroes,
historians will wonder if anyone may cover such vast historical and
political territory—in chapters that run from but fifteen to twenty
pages—without succumbing to the threat of superficiality.
The seventeen-page Hawthorne chapter, for example, contains very
little historical information. Aside from a few references to Hawthorne’s contemporary,
the historian George Bancroft, the chapter consists exclusively of
Bush’s glossing the usual suspects of Hawthorne scholarship.
Thus, aside from Hawthorne and Bancroft, there is not
one primary document in the chapter.
Bush’s mastery of the relevant secondary sources is not in
question, nor is his nuanced reading of Hawthorne; rather, one simply
questions how such secondary-driven readings contribute to or expand our
collective understanding of the period’s rich complications and
possibilities.
One wonders, then, about the institutional and/or
genre-bound parameters of American
Declarations. Consider
chapter 8: “Trilling’s Frost versus Kennedy’s Frost: Competing
Poles of Paradox within America’s Regnant Myth.”
The chapter examines Lionel Trilling’s 26 March 1959 tribute to
Robert Frost on the occasion of Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday and the
ensuing public debates regarding Trilling’s attempt to spin Frost’s
relationship to the nation in politically radical directions.
Bush situates this cultural battle within the “tensions that
began to surface during the final few years of Frost’s life, when the
conservative Eisenhower administration gave way to Kennedy’s highly
charged vision of the New Frontier” (170).
Trilling’s radicalizing read of Frost, then, was “an attempt
to declare independence from the ingrained and ossified perspectives of
the cold war era. It was
yet another manifestation of the American metanoia” (171).
Readers have little idea how Bush approaches Eisenhower’s
conservatism or Kennedy’s New Frontier or the cold war era’s
“ossified perspectives,” however, for here again, much like the
Hawthorne chapter, one finds little discussion of the period’s
political crises and almost no historical information.
Given this lack of historical context, the claim that
Trilling’s speech is “another manifestation of American metanoia”
feels more like an assertion than an argument, more like a smart hunch
than a historically-nuanced case study.
American
Declarations thus raises important methodological concerns about how
one engages in rhetorical criticism, particularly regarding the vexing
question of how to comprehend the dialectical tensions between texts and
contexts. Perhaps nine case studies are simply too many.
Perhaps rhetorical scholars would do well to focus on smaller
chunks of historical ground in more archival detail.
Perhaps Americanists can advance our collective understanding of
our national past more effectively not by re-reading canonical figures
but by uncovering previously unheard or marginalized voices.
Perhaps we would do well to turn from thinking of America in
terms of the lure of its mythological promises towards historically
detailed analyses of how those promises have been either kept or
compromised according to political imperatives. One wonders, then, if the time has come to move away from
collections of short case studies strung loosely together by theoretical
concerns towards detailed rhetorical analyses of how political actors
sought to persuade fellow citizens regarding specific crises in specific
historical moments.
Stephen Hartnett teaches speech communication at the
University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
