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Changing American minds: Performanc...

Stanford University.

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Changing American minds: Performances of evangelism in the early Republic.

Record Type:	Language materials, printed : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Changing American minds: Performances of evangelism in the early Republic./
Author:	Kendall, Anthony Barrett.
Description:	332 p.
Notes:	Adviser: Harry J. Elam, Jr.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International69-02A.
Subject:	History, United States. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3302839
ISBN:	9780549489979

Changing American minds: Performances of evangelism in the early Republic.
Kendall, Anthony Barrett.

Changing American minds: Performances of evangelism in the early Republic. - 332 p.

Adviser: Harry J. Elam, Jr.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2008.

This dissertation, "Changing American Minds: Performances of Evangelism in the Early Republic," applies methodologies of performance studies to revivals and related evangelical practices among post-Revolutionary Methodists (1780-1830), in order to understand how they persuaded participants, retained converts, and popularized a performative basis for religious conceptions of individual agency, social relations, and cultural identity. Understood as a mode of social cooperation, performance allowed Methodists to navigate the theological tension between divine and human agency in salvation in a way that blurred the distinction between them. Moreover, Methodist practices exploited the slippage between the ritualistic and theatrical modes of performance in order to propel participants through both the conversion process and post-conversion development of evangelical identity.

ISBN: 9780549489979Subjects--Topical Terms:

1017393
History, United States.

Changing American minds: Performances of evangelism in the early Republic.
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040 $a UMI $c UMI
100 1 $a Kendall, Anthony Barrett. $3 1022929
245 1 0 $a Changing American minds: Performances of evangelism in the early Republic.
300 $a 332 p.
500 $a Adviser: Harry J. Elam, Jr.
500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0724.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2008.
520 $a This dissertation, "Changing American Minds: Performances of Evangelism in the Early Republic," applies methodologies of performance studies to revivals and related evangelical practices among post-Revolutionary Methodists (1780-1830), in order to understand how they persuaded participants, retained converts, and popularized a performative basis for religious conceptions of individual agency, social relations, and cultural identity. Understood as a mode of social cooperation, performance allowed Methodists to navigate the theological tension between divine and human agency in salvation in a way that blurred the distinction between them. Moreover, Methodist practices exploited the slippage between the ritualistic and theatrical modes of performance in order to propel participants through both the conversion process and post-conversion development of evangelical identity.
520 $a This project traces the trajectory of the iterative practices prescribed for participants, elucidating with each step the various ways that Methodists performed evangelism. It begins by examining how the Methodist emphasis on religious experience established emotion as the medium of spiritual communication and the production of enthusiasm as the technology of conversion. A core set of evangelical practices, including hymn-singing, prayer, preaching, and exhortation, first "awakened" worshippers' desires to participate in performative transformations of self. The explicit theatricality of these practices, however, both seduced and repelled participants, compelling them to retreat psychologically from the public arena into an interiorized, private psychomachia of the soul. Methodist practices then intensified this theatricality in order to create for participants an embodied experience of entrapment in a paradoxical crisis of agency. A strong desire to act, coupled with a perceived inability to do so, paralyzed and exhausted the participant until a transcendent experience, interpreted as conversion, could finally occur.
520 $a After conversion, the deep suspicion of theatricality and the theatrical means of religious experience persisted in the practices by which Methodists validated their experiences to themselves and one another. New converts were expected to translate their affective experiences into linguistic performances of testimony, and they also strove for an affective repetition of that original conversion experience through both the routine pursuit of inspiration in worship and especially through efforts to attain a second conversion-type experience known as sanctification, or Christian perfection. Moreover, Methodism successfully transferred the performative regulation of behavior in its ritualized practices into believers' everyday lives through the notion of piety. This concept relied on an explicitly theatrical construct---the conscious construction of everyday behaviors as performances for a divine audience---but at the same time Methodist piety incorporated performance standards that explicitly sought to transcend the theatrical construction of a bifurcated self that characterized the believer's pre-conversion identity. Thus, the push-pull of theatricality in Methodist practices continued to operate in the daily lives of believers, even to their dying moments.
520 $a In all, the performativity of Methodist evangelical practices generated deeply held values about the construction of self in society, including confession, spontaneity, and heightened self-consciousness combined with an antipathy to theatricality, that persist to this day in American minds and American culture. The dissertation illustrates how performance studies offers a valuable methodology for interdisciplinary research, providing a framework and vocabulary capable of integrating the insights of various disciplines into a coherent historical analysis.
590 $a School code: 0212.
650 4 $a History, United States. $3 1017393
650 4 $a Religion, History of. $3 1017471
650 4 $a Theater. $3 522973
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710 2 0 $a Stanford University. $3 754827
773 0 $t Dissertation Abstracts International $g 69-02A.
790 $a 0212
790 1 0 $a Elam, Harry J., Jr., $e advisor
791 $a Ph.D.
792 $a 2008
856 4 0 $u http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3302839