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Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women's Autobiographical Writings in the AmericasActs of Narrative Resistance: Women's Autobiographical Writings in the AmericasContinental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North AmericaMigrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures

Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women's Autobiographical Writings in the AmericasActs of Narrative... 662 American Literature rich and complex study of how early American colonists and the Indians they encountered “enlisted ritual, rupture, and narrative to reflect on the hazards they endured,” and how, in the process, they “[told] the story of modernity to themselves” (2–3). Preceded by analysis of John Smith’s travel narratives and the Salem witch trials, and followed by consideration of John Marrant’s Methodist journal, Susanna Rowson’s novels, and the Aaron Burr conspiracy, Wheatley helps Fichtelberg make the argument that “[t]o record risk . . . is at once to constitute, to master, and to yield to its disruptive power” (8). Grounded in Anthony Giddens’s account of modernity (from which the phrase “risk culture” is borrowed) and in theories of the performative, Fichtelberg’s provocative readings of better- and lesser-known texts of the early American period lay out a “cultural vocabulary for risk” that facilitated “that reflexive self-scrutiny central to actors in a liberal order,” a reflexivity emblematic of modernity itself (9, 186). According to Fichtelberg, Wheatley’s poetry furnished “spiritual weight to the ruptures shaping Western lives” (95). Wheatley’s “feminine sublime” articulates ambivalence about “the social and spiritual peril” attached to Calvinist faith (94), the new affiliations that follow “the http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American Literature Duke University Press

Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women's Autobiographical Writings in the AmericasActs of Narrative Resistance: Women's Autobiographical Writings in the AmericasContinental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North AmericaMigrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures

Coats, Lauren; Jones, Laura
American Literature , Volume 83 (3) – Sep 1, 2011
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Duke Univ Press
ISSN
0002-9831
eISSN
1527-2117
DOI
10.1215/00029831-1339944
Publisher site
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Abstract

662 American Literature rich and complex study of how early American colonists and the Indians they encountered “enlisted ritual, rupture, and narrative to reflect on the hazards they endured,” and how, in the process, they “[told] the story of modernity to themselves” (2–3). Preceded by analysis of John Smith’s travel narratives and the Salem witch trials, and followed by consideration of John Marrant’s Methodist journal, Susanna Rowson’s novels, and the Aaron Burr conspiracy, Wheatley helps Fichtelberg make the argument that “[t]o record risk . . . is at once to constitute, to master, and to yield to its disruptive power” (8). Grounded in Anthony Giddens’s account of modernity (from which the phrase “risk culture” is borrowed) and in theories of the performative, Fichtelberg’s provocative readings of better- and lesser-known texts of the early American period lay out a “cultural vocabulary for risk” that facilitated “that reflexive self-scrutiny central to actors in a liberal order,” a reflexivity emblematic of modernity itself (9, 186). According to Fichtelberg, Wheatley’s poetry furnished “spiritual weight to the ruptures shaping Western lives” (95). Wheatley’s “feminine sublime” articulates ambivalence about “the social and spiritual peril” attached to Calvinist faith (94), the new affiliations that follow “the

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American Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Sep 1, 2011

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