By Paul Hurh
ISBN-10: 0804791147
ISBN-13: 9780804791144
Read or Download American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville PDF
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Additional info for American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville
Example text
In Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts 98) Not only does Davenport single out the audience for especial concern—“in the seats, in the pews, in the galleries”—but he offers little consolation to them. We can hear the auditor’s surprise at the sermon’s truncated ending as much as at the content of the sermon; hellfire sermons were nothing new to the colonies, but they always had, to greater or lesser extent, a happy ending—an application, a call for a change of behavior, or even a dire warning. They didn’t merely damn the congregation and leave it wallowing in its damned state.
The two chapters together read Poe’s tales as not, or at least not only, critiques of the limits of reason but rather as experiments through which he imagined a literature modeled upon objective method. That these tales are frequently terrifying, however, should not be taken as a sign of their shortcomings but, as in Edwards’s terror of conviction, as a display of their truth. 29 Ultimately, what endorses such a critical methodology cannot be any local or political action that issues from it but rather, at heart, the feeling of reason’s implacable demands of objectivity.
The method of applying close readings for theoretical content alongside recovering historical contexts already strains the size of the chapters, so some omission is necessary. Moreover, arranging the chapters in more topical, less author-specific fashion might have enabled a wider coverage, but at the expense of the particular understanding of each text. I want to make general claims, but to ground them in specific evidence, in the historical and textual particulars of the literature, and that requires a density of ground that would subvert the sweep of a general historical study.