Sincere Performances: Franklin, Tillotson, and Steele on the Plain Style

This essay uses the example of Franklin's essay "On Literary Style," Tillotson's sermon "On Sincerity towards God and Man," and Steele's Spectator 103 to set up terms for thinking about a text as both self-relativizing and concerned with the sincerity of language. While these pieces each refer to the principles of plain and sincere language they also, to varying degrees, make it clear that these principles are being broken, altered, and subverted by the text in which they appear. This means that at one level the pieces break down the idea that words have a stable referent in the world: the literary style that they describe as self-evident is a fiction which is being made and changed even as Franklin and Steele describe it. This local example of a performance that is embedded in a tradition of eighteenth-century writing about writing suggests that readers and writers of this period were much more actively involved in the performance of truth than critiques of Enlightenment ideology generally suggest.