American Spaces of Conversion: The Conductive Imaginaries of Edwards, Emerson, and James

by Andrea Knutson

Overview

The religious precepts of the Puritans continued to affect intellectual life in the U.S. long after the immigrants arrived at Massachusetts Bay, circulating through New England culture well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using three emblematic figures—Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James—American Spaces of Conversion examines how the Puritan legacy, especially the concept of conversion, shaped developments in American literature, theology, and pragmatist philosophy.

Knutson grounds her study with the testimonies collected by the Puritan minister Thomas Shepard, which reveal an active pursuit of belief occurring at the intersection of perception, intellection, affection, and doctrine. This pursuit of belief, codified in the morphology of conversion, was originally undertaken by the Puritans as a way to conceptualize redemption in a fallen state. It established the epistemological contours for what Edwards, Emerson, and James would theorize as a conductive imaginary-consciousness, a state both receptive and active, as a force responsible for translating the effects of experience and generating original relations with self, community, and God.

With an interdisciplinary approach that combines religion, literature, and philosophy, Knutson demonstrates how the triad of writers discussed here "ministered" to their audiences, encouraging the attachment of new meaning to ordinary contexts in a continual effort toward regeneration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195370928
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/03/2010
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Andrea Knutson is Assistant Professor of English at Oakland University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter One A Believing Attitude

Chapter Two "Something That is Seen, That is Wonderful": Jonathan Edwards and the Feeling of Conviction

Chapter Three Ralph Waldo Emerson and the "Universal Impulse to Believe"

Chapter Four William James's Uncertain Universe: Theory as Theology in The Varieties of Religious Experience

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Knutson has given us a powerful rethinking and cogent reformulation of one of the main currents in American thought. This is a fresh new take on the conversion experience with the emphasis on experience." —Robert D. Richardson, author of William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

"Knutson writes a powerful intellectual history that foregrounds the Puritan process of conversion in the New World and then follows a trajectory from Jonathan Edwards, to Emerson, to, finally, William James." —Ronald Bosco, coeditor of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The book's strength, then, lies in its ability to marry Max Weber's industrious Puritan to Perry Miller's ecstatic Puritan of 'the Augustinian strain' and insist that these two cohered together at the same time - and even more, that this curious blend of quotidian determination and openness to unknowable transcendence marks a distinguished intellectual tradition in the United States, one that the reader might also take up as a viable way of thinking through life."—Early American Literature

From the Publisher