Title Sacred estrangement : the rhetoric of conversion in modern American autobiography / Peter A. Dorsey

Published University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, ©1993

Click on the following:
JSTOR eBooks

Copies

Description 1 online resource (x, 214 pages) Series Book collections on Project MUSE Contents Introduction : conversion and the autobiographical tradition -- The Christian framework -- Dividing the word : Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the consequences of secularization -- Conversion to pragmatism : The varieties of religious experience and The education of Henry Adams -- Conversion to signification : the autobiography of Henry James -- Conversion and separation : Edith Wharton's Backward glance and Ellen Glasgow's Woman within -- The varieties of black experience : Zora Neale Hurston's Dust tracks on a road and the autobiography of Richard Wright -- Afterword : conversion and cultural poetics Summary Sacred Estrangement analyzes certain works by important American writers and thinkers in the context of the "rhetoric of conversion." Such analysis is especially valuable because it provides a reliable index of the relationship between the self and larger communities. Traditionally, "conversion" has served a socializing function, signifying that one has come into alignment with certain linguistic, behavioral, and cultural expectations. The socialization process is particularly apparent in the Christian conversion narratives of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries: by publicly testifying to a conversion experience, believers became empowered members, not only of God's elect community but also of a local population. As modern autobiography developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Christian pattern was secularized and individualized. Conversion became a model for many kinds of psychological change. With the coming of the twentieth century, however, the authors upon whom Peter Dorsey focuses, including William and Henry James, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, radically revised conversion rhetoric. If conversion had traditionally linked the search for illumination with the search for a defined social role, these writers increasingly used conversion as an index of estrangement from mainstream America. Dorsey documents this profound change in the way American intellectuals defined the "self," not in terms of personal orientation toward or away from a given community, but as a resistance to such an orientation altogether, as if social forces by their "nature" were a threat to personal identity Analysis American prose literature History and criticism Authors, American Biography History and criticism Autobiography Christianity and literature United States Conversion in literature English language Rhetoric United States Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-208) and index Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL Print version record Subject American prose literature -- History and criticism Authors, American -- Biography -- History and criticism Christianity and literature -- United States English language -- United States -- Rhetoric Conversion in literature. Autobiography. Autobiographies as Topic autobiography (genre) LITERARY CRITICISM -- American -- General. BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Religious. American prose literature Authors, American -- Biography Autobiography Christianity and literature Conversion in literature English language -- Rhetoric Autobiografische Literatur. Konversion Religion. Konversion Religion, Motiv. autobiographie -- conversion (théologie) -- littérature américaine (Etats-Unis) Geschichte 1870-1990. United States USA. Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Autobiography. Form Electronic book LC no. 92016589 ISBN 9780271073422 027107342X 9780271073408 0271073403

  Permalink