The Rhetorical Construction of the Reader in Early America.
When Anne Bradstreet asserts that she is "obnoxious to every harping tongue, / Who says my hand a needle better fits," our critical tendency has been to use these lines to better understand the poet, her ostensible resistance to patriarchal expectations, or perhaps her humility. Wigglesworth, who anticipates the surprise his peers may feel at finding Wigglesworth "in Print" is seemingly providing information--excuses, really--for his illness and subsequent inability to work in the pulpit. But these poets are also engaging in an important and oft-overlooked discursive practice within their prefatory poems: they are constructing their readers, rejecting those who would not read them "right" and instructing others on how to read, how to interpret. The poets, and other writers in other genres, are reacting, largely, to an increasing lack of control over the interpretive practices of their readers--and this reaction constructs and reflects change in the genres in which these writers choose to write.
In my paper I will explore the discursive practices of prefatory materials (prefaces, prefatory poems, and extended prose titles) appearing in a range of publications (but focusing primarily on published volumes of poetry of the 17th century). I will show how these materials serve to construct readers in particular ways and, further, across time, how these discursive practices themselves change, reconstructing the social identities of "poets," "historians," "preachers," and "captives" and reconstructing the genres in which they write. An important product of analysis of these discursive practices is understanding in detail the relationship between generic and social change within culture and, specificially, within the rapidly changing culture of early America.
This paper is part of a larger study in which I am using "text-oriented discourse analysis" in the manner described by Norman Fairclough (v. Discourse and Social Change [Cambridge: Polity, 1992]) on several specific genres of print publications across the 17th and 18th centuries—and will likely include examples that deal with historical narratives, in which we find similar rhetorical strategies. Applying rhetorical analysis reveals the close relationships between changes in discursive practices, generic change, and social change--relationships that, due to the emergence of print culture, are accelerating across the period of the study. Rather than arguing for the significance of that emerging print culture, this project attempts to articulate the detailed ways in which cultural change is represented within genres and within specific discursive practices, that is to uncover the rhetorical strategies we see at work in the period.
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