Reviews of Books

Ever since the ancient Greeks, speech and writing have competed for authority in Western culture. The one claimed authenticity as a direct, immediate expression of the human voice; the other prided itself on the permanence it gave to evanescent words through inscription on paper and in print. The efflux of sounds into the air, speech could be hailed as divine inspiration or denounced as demonic possession. The record of thoughts on papyrus or paper, writing could transmit vital knowledge over time or appear a mere "dead letter" (p. xvi), sundered from its human origin. Across time, forms of writing and speech have played various roles in human cultures, mediating relations of individuals and groups to social authority and spiritual power. So it was in early America, where different traditions of expression—English, Native American, and African American—mingled and collided and where the spoken word gradually gained ascendancy as the dominant mode of public conversation. As John Quincy Adams and other Americans proclaimed in the later nineteenth century, eloquence is power.	1
In her new book of that title, Sandra M. Gustafson traces how Americans of different stripes arrived at this conviction and explores its consequences in politics, social relations, and the shaping of American literature. Eloquence was not always power; it acquired its social authority gradually during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Puritans viewed public speech warily, as a potential source of disorder. Yet they praised eloquence when it was harnessed to a biblical text, admiring vital performances of the Word by preachers animated by the divine spirit. During the Salem witchcraft trials and the Great Awakening, spontaneous speech of ordinary people claimed new spiritual authority. In the secular realm as well, formal oratory was upgraded as a medium of public communication. Eighteenth-century republicanism revived neoclassical ideas about rhetoric, and as whig spokesmen put them into practice during the Revolution, public speaking became the most important medium of political discourse. This advance of public speech in religion and politics did not come without conflict. As Gustafson demonstrates, eloquence was a highly contested form of social power. Elites sought to secure deference through their erudition and expertise as interpreters of printed texts. Outsiders to learned culture, from the possessed girls of Salem to the evangelical ministers Samson Occom and John Marrant, asserted the spiritual authority of vernacular and natural speech; in the process, they challenged existing hierarchies of gender and race. Indeed, as new forms of speech gained enhanced value in British North America, they proved a valuable resource for both Native Americans and African Americans. Both Occom and Marrant drew on distinctive traditions of oratory in their cultures of origin, even as they used writing to assert their claims to civilization. In highlighting the interplay among various modes of speech, Gustafson does in practice what so many scholars assert in theory: she carries out the multicultural study of early American literature and culture.	2
In its methods and concepts, Eloquence Is Power makes an innovative contribution to the history of the book in early America. Gustafson situates her work in a recent body of scholarship that has redefined the ends of literary criticism. This new approach, represented by the work of Jay Fliegelman, David Shields, Michael Warner, Christopher Looby, and Nancy Ruttenberg, among others, moves beyond texts, genres, even discourses, to elucidate how material forms of knowledge are mobilized, in specific times and places, as instruments of social and cultural power. From this standpoint, Gustafson interrogates the ancient division between speech and writing, which has acquired new life in contemporary scholarship as the opposition between "oral culture" and "print culture." Speech, she insists, constitutes an integral part of the history of the book: the living voice and printed texts in early America acquired their social importance in symbiotic relationship to one another. Even as print became more abundant and familiar in early America, it was accompanied by the "persistence, adaptation, and creativity of oral genres" (p. xvii).	. . .