Performatively Speaking: Speech and Action in Antebellum American Literature

by Debra J. Rosenthal

Overview

In Performatively Speaking, Debra Rosenthal draws on speech act theory to open up the current critical conversation about antebellum American fiction and culture and to explore what happens when writers use words not just to represent action but to constitute action itself. Examining moments of discursive action in a range of canonical and noncanonical works—T. S. Arthur's temperance tales, Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick—she shows how words act when writers no longer hold to a difference between writing and doing.

The author investigates, for example, the voluntary self-binding nature of a promise, the formulaic but transformative temperance pledge, the power of Ruth Hall's signature or name on legal documents, the punitive hate speech of Hester Prynne's scarlet letter A, the prohibitory vodun hex of Simon Legree's slave Cassy, and Captain Ahab's injurious insults to second mate Stubb. Through her comparative methodology and historicist and feminist readings, Rosenthal asks readers to rethink the ways that speech and action intersect.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813936987
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	05/12/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	148
File size:	784 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Debra J. Rosenthal, author of Race Mixture in Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Spanish American Fictions: Gender, Culture, and Nation Building, is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of English at John Carroll University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Discursive Action, or Doing by Saying 1

Chapter 1 Slave Promises and the Temperance Pledge 17

Chapter 2 Theorizing the Signature in Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall 44

Chapter 3 The Scarlet A as Action 62

Chapter 4 Verbal Violence in Uncle Tom's Cabin 81

Chapter 5 Action and Injurious Speech in Moby-Dick 99

Conclusion: The Right Words and National Standing 113

Notes 117

Bibliography 125

Index 135

Editorial Reviews

This very important work uses the lens of performative speech to examine antebellum texts. It proves an extremely productive lens, allowing the author both to enrich previous criticism and to come to original conclusions about these texts. This is a formidably subtle and powerful study, one that will serve as an excellent model for future work by other scholars.

Faye Halpern

This study uses speech act theory to analyze how nineteenth-century authors use language to both represent action and perform action, thus breaking down the barrier between writing and doing. By close reading specific scenes in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Herman Melville’s Moby- Dick (1851), Rosenthal argues that these writers 'demonstrate that words can indeed restructure power.'

American Literature

"This very important work uses the lens of performative speech to examine antebellum texts. It proves an extremely productive lens, allowing the author both to enrich previous criticism and to come to original conclusions about these texts. This is a formidably subtle and powerful study, one that will serve as an excellent model for future work by other scholars. "—Faye Halpern, University of Calgary, author of Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric

"This study uses speech act theory to analyze how nineteenth-century authors use language to both represent action and perform action, thus breaking down the barrier between writing and doing. By close reading specific scenes in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Herman Melville’s Moby- Dick (1851), Rosenthal argues that these writers 'demonstrate that words can indeed restructure power.' "—author of American Literature

From the Publisher