Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes
The Unsettled Records of American Settlement
9780226818467
9780226818450
9780226818474
Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes
The Unsettled Records of American Settlement
Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes unpacks the interpretive problems of colonial treaty-making and uses them to illuminate canonical works from the period.
Classic American literature, Jerome McGann argues, is haunted by the betrayal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian treaties—“a stunned memory preserved in the negative spaces of the treaty records.” A noted scholar of the “textual conditions” of literature, McGann investigates canonical works from the colonial period, including the Arbella sermon and key writings of William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated treaty folios and Autobiography, and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. These are highly practical, purpose-driven works—the record of Enlightenment dreams put to the severe test of dangerous conditions. McGann suggests that the treaty-makers never doubted the unsettled character of what they were prosecuting, and a similar conflicted ethos pervades these works. Like the treaty records, they deliberately test themselves against stringent measures of truth and accomplishment and show a distinctive consciousness of their limits and failures. McGann’s book is ultimately a reminder of the public importance of truth and memory—the vocational commitments of humanist scholars and educators.
Classic American literature, Jerome McGann argues, is haunted by the betrayal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian treaties—“a stunned memory preserved in the negative spaces of the treaty records.” A noted scholar of the “textual conditions” of literature, McGann investigates canonical works from the colonial period, including the Arbella sermon and key writings of William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated treaty folios and Autobiography, and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. These are highly practical, purpose-driven works—the record of Enlightenment dreams put to the severe test of dangerous conditions. McGann suggests that the treaty-makers never doubted the unsettled character of what they were prosecuting, and a similar conflicted ethos pervades these works. Like the treaty records, they deliberately test themselves against stringent measures of truth and accomplishment and show a distinctive consciousness of their limits and failures. McGann’s book is ultimately a reminder of the public importance of truth and memory—the vocational commitments of humanist scholars and educators.
272 pages | 11 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2022
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature, General Criticism and Critical Theory
Reviews
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Introduction
1: Scope and Method
2: The Exceptional Encounter
3: On Native Grounds: North American Treaty-Making (ca. 1609–1721)
Part I: Puritan Enlightenment: Via Dolorosa
Prologue
4: William Bradford: The Diary (1620–21), the History (Of Plymouth Plantation), and the Hebrew Studies
5: John Winthrop: From Journal to History
6: Anne Bradstreet: The World Elsewhere
7: Cotton Mather’s Magnalia
Interchapter 1. Covenant Chain Treaty-Making and Franklin’s Folios
Part II. Secular Enlightenment: The Importance of Failure
8: Franklin’s Autobiography: Composition as Explanation
9: The Education of Thomas Jefferson
Interchapter 2. The End of Kaswentha: A Brief History
Part III. Truth and Method
10: The Arbella Sermon: A Case Study
11: The American Scholar in the Twenty-first Century
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Preface
Introduction
1: Scope and Method
2: The Exceptional Encounter
3: On Native Grounds: North American Treaty-Making (ca. 1609–1721)
Part I: Puritan Enlightenment: Via Dolorosa
Prologue
4: William Bradford: The Diary (1620–21), the History (Of Plymouth Plantation), and the Hebrew Studies
5: John Winthrop: From Journal to History
6: Anne Bradstreet: The World Elsewhere
7: Cotton Mather’s Magnalia
Interchapter 1. Covenant Chain Treaty-Making and Franklin’s Folios
Part II. Secular Enlightenment: The Importance of Failure
8: Franklin’s Autobiography: Composition as Explanation
9: The Education of Thomas Jefferson
Interchapter 2. The End of Kaswentha: A Brief History
Part III. Truth and Method
10: The Arbella Sermon: A Case Study
11: The American Scholar in the Twenty-first Century
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index