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Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. By Sandra M. Gustafson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xxvi, 287. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $17.95.)
Sandra M. Gustafson traces the symbolic use of oratory in conflicts over culture, religion, empire, and nation in America from the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. The key turning point was the middle of the eighteenth century, a time when conservative elements sought to revive classical oratory in order to counteract a democratization of print culture. Yet it was also a time when first the Great Awakening and then the American Revolution had the effect of democratizing oratory itself.
Gustafson's first conceptual move is to correct teleological histories that construe print culture as supplanting oral culture. Duly granting the ascendancy of print culture, Gustafson concentrates on the persistence of oral genres within this shifting context. Essentially the subaltern history of an oral genre, Eloquence Is Power chronicles not sweeping triumph, but embattled resilience.
Yet Eloquence Is Power is concerned neither strictly nor merely with oratory. Gustafson's second conceptual move is a deft one, because the central framework guiding the analysis is a dialectic between orality and textuality-what Gustafson calls "the performance semiotic of speech and text" (xvi). Focal are oratorical claims to power and authenticity made either through reliance upon or repudiation of textual authority. Proponents of "speech" generally favored the living voice over the dead text as their way of challenging social hierarchies that were to their disadvantage. Proponents of "text," on the other hand, typically favored stable...