The impact of science on the American literary jeremiad

This dissertation argues that American writers have developed a distinctive rhetorical mode over the last four centuries that incorporates the language of scientific and technological advancement in terms of the original Puritan covenant. This rhetorical mode resembles the jeremiad in that these advancements tend to be interpreted in terms of America's mission in the New World, and therefore responds to rapid advancements in knowledge and invention, as well as to the country's penchant for periodic bouts of spiritual renewal, or "great awakenings." Although scientific disinterest may seem to oscillate with periods of increased religious skepticism, the underlying cause is in fact a deep synthesis of religious and rationalistic tendencies that began with the English colonization of New England by Puritans and continues to this day. Although temporary correctives in religious enthusiasm have indeed occurred, American literature and American culture as a whole have gravitated toward scientific and/or technological advances that, by their nature, promote the American enterprise. Thus, the overarching tendency for Americans to think of religion and science in different spheres of influence has, ironically, ensured an amalgam of the two modes of thought. Because periods of enhanced religious fervor are typified by a rhetorical practice that the critic Sacvan Bercovitch has called the American jeremiad, scientific and technological breakthroughs have resulted in counter-currents that are eventually subsumed by the jeremiad of American exceptionalism and sense of destiny, a process that can be traced rhetorically in essays and imaginative literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Therefore, the religious content of the American jeremiad and the counter-current of scientific rationalism never really reach the level of bipolar opposition that might allow one to gain supremacy over the other, and, in fact, the lack of a clear-cut scientific rationalism in public discourse is reflected in the exemplary writings of a representative group of essayists, namely Cotton Matter, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Adams, as well as in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow.