Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America

Notes

NOTES Introduction 1. Mendelsohn, “But Enough About Me.” 2. It is now commonplace to claim that we live in a “confessional culture.” Two of the better descriptions of this culture belong to Peter Brooks and Ben Yagoda. See Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 140; and Yagoda, Memoir, 28–29. However, confessional culture’s classic description—part of which is quoted in virtually every analysis of confession except this one—belongs to Michel Foucault. See History of Sexuality, 59. 3. Confessional crises are thus analogous to what Edward Schiappa has called “definitional ruptures.” Such “ruptures,” he argues, are moments in time in which particular circumstances require a people to “address the issue of how words are defined.” Correspondingly, I am interrogating six moments in which the word “confession” lost it self-evident character and no longer seemed a ubiquitous, normal part of American life. Rather, in each crisis, confession itself became a widely contested practice and the subject of national debate. Schiappa, Defining Reality, 9. 4. Mailloux, Reception Histories, 54, 55. 5. McChesney, Political Economy of Media. 6. Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 11. 7. Ibid., 3. 8. Ibid., 3, 81, 87, 64. See also: “There is something inherently unstable and unreliable about the speech-act of confession, about its meaning and motives” (23). 9. Yardley, “Shelve Them Under Navel-Gazing.” 10. Shields, Reality Hunger, 35. 11. Mendelsohn, “But Enough About Me.” 12. Mailloux, Reception Histories, 55–56. Mailloux’s work on reception history has gained wide acceptance and been used to rethink the place of cultural studies within the humanities writ large. See Cain, Reconceptualizing American Literary/Cultural Studies. More recently, see Goldstein and Machor, New Directions in American Reception Study. These demonstrate the prestigious, interdisciplinary acceptance of the critical practice to which Mailloux gave early voice and which informs my work. 13. Lazare, On Apology, 26, 25, 24. 14. Williams, Culture and Society, xix (emphasis mine). 15. Mailloux, Reception Histories, 77. 16. Working in an explicitly pragmatist tradition (like Mailloux), Schiappa argues, “Definitions always serve interests and advance values, and they always require the exercise of power.” Schiappa, Defining Reality, 177. Building on Schiappa’s work, Zarefsky argues, “Questions of the form, ‘What is X?’ are not susceptible to answer because they are overly abstracted from the world of experience in which people’s own values and commitments determine what X means. The ‘real nature’ of X, in other words, is a matter of how X is used in communication.” Zarefsky, “Definitions,” 4. 17. Bauer, Art of the Public Grovel, 4, 89, 76, 143–45, 150. 18. Foucault, Abnormal, 70, 82, 84, 85, 171; and History of Sexuality, 63–68. 19. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this distinction in Foucault’s account of confession. As he put it in a 1980 lecture at Dartmouth, the modern confession “is much more concerned with thoughts than with actions. . . . So much so that the primary material for scrutiny and for the examination of the self is an area anterior to actions.” Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” 216–17. See also Foucault, “Writing the Self,” 235; Foucault and Sennett, “Sexuality and Solitude,” 6; and Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 30, 45. 20. For a detailed explanation of this shift in Foucault’s theory of confession, see Tell, “Rhetoric and Power.” 21. Mailloux, “Rhetorical Hermeneutics in Theory,” 5–6. See also Mailloux, Reception Histories, 55–56. 22. I use the term “political economy” advisedly. In 2004 Robert McChesney wrote that political economy “addresses the nature of the relationship between media of communication systems on the one hand and the broader social structure of society on the other.” Substituting “the genre of confession” for “media of communication systems,” this is precisely my own methodology. McChesney, “Making a Molehill out of a Mountain,” 43. 23. Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 9. 24. Qtd. in French, Rebellious Slave, 259. 25. Hicks, “Writer Challenges Brownell to Act in Till Kidnap–Murder Case.” 26. Schultze, Televangelism and American Culture, 58. 27. Anon., “Heckler Calls Swaggart a Hypocrite.” 28. No one has better championed (or documented) the capacity of ordinary citizens to engage in sophisticated literary argument than Rosa A. Eberly has. In the aptly titled Citizen Critics, Eberly uses the term “citizen critic” to describe “a person who produces discourses of common concern from an ethos of citizen first and foremost—not as an expert or spokesperson for a workplace or as member of a club or organization.” Eberly, Citizen Critics, 1. 29. Rich, “Truthiness 101.” Chapter...