Resistance and the Sermon: The Cultural Work of Literary Preaching from Emerson to Morrison

Abstract

Resistance and the Sermon asks two central questions. First, how might we account for the fact that, across a long period of US literary history, a wide variety of writers have subverted the predominantly religious content of the sermon in order reimagine profound moments of reform in a political, cultural, aesthetic, and principally secular mode? Second, what is the significance of this pattern, which I refer to as literary preaching, in US literature? Over the introduction and four chapters, I focus on works in which an author’s anxious embrace of the sermon gestures in politically contradictory directions. On the one hand, authors deploy the sermonic form to critique prevailing ideologies and call for a more egalitarian and humanitarian ethos. On the other hand, however, this embrace of the sermon reifies hierarchical power formations by presenting the voice of the preacher as the paradigm of moral authority. By recourse to the concept of affordances—used in design theory to discuss the latent potentialities of an object or material—I offer a uniquely flexible and nuanced analysis of US authors’ appropriation of the sermon. This approach enables us to grasp the vexed relation to the sermon one sees in writers who embrace the form’s associations with moral authority and verbal artistry while simultaneously resisting its reinforcement of a hierarchical and anti-modern religious formation that often opposes the authority of the literary author. My focus on the contradictory affordances of the sermon explains not only the form’s attractiveness to particular authors but, more importantly, its portability across time. I contend that negotiating the attractive and repulsive affordances of literary preaching is one of the central and undertheorized problems of US literary history, and I trace the development of this problem through works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, James Weldon Johnson, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison.