Though the nineteenth century has long been associated with the rise of rationalism in American culture, cultural historians have in recent years grown increasingly interested in the limits of rationalism as an interpretive tool. On the one hand, scholars such as John Lardas Modern (Secularism in Antebellum America (UChicago P 2011)), Peter Coviello (Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (UChicago P 2019)), and Emily Ogden (Credulity: A Cultural History of U.S. Mesmerism (UChicago P 2020)) have compellingly argued that the nineteenth-century rise of secularism did not necessarily result in a more rational United States; instead, it paradoxically caused systems of irrational belief (such as religion and superstition) to proliferate. On the other hand, scholars such as Kyla Schuller (The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke UP 2018)), Nicholas Gaskill (Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color (U of Minnesota Press 2018)), and Erica Fretwell (Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke UP 2020)) have drawn attention to the way nonrational, embodied phenomena such as perception and feeling shaped and were shaped by the period’s scientific and cultural knowledge. In other words, the suggestion that nineteenth-century Americans were largely rational actors in control of their own bodies and minds has, in the last decade (and especially in the last five years), grown increasingly untenable.

This panel engages with this broad critique of rationalism, bringing together three scholars who have recently published monographs on the role of irrational and nonrational experience in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. More concretely, it explores how such phenomena as attention, volition, and religious experience shaped nineteenth-century understandings of agency and selfhood. The panel thus provides a much-needed space to discuss a topic of pressing interest to the fields of nineteenth-century American literary and cultural studies.

Each panelist will present for fifteen minutes, and there will be no respondent; this will leave plenty of time for generative conversation. Patrick Kindig will begin the panel by exploring the role of fascination—a kind of compulsive, irrational attention—in late nineteenth-century American culture. Kindig’s presentation, “Henry Adams’s Fascinating Dynamo,” will argue that Adams’s famous meditation on the power of the dynamo in “The Dynamo and the Virgin” might best be understood as a meditation on the dynamo’s ability to fascinate, its power to draw attention and overwhelm onlookers’ faculties of rational comprehension in quasi-mystical ways. This power, Kindig will go on to show, was not an idiosyncratic interest of Adams’s; in fact, it was central to the way many late nineteenth-century thinkers and writers conceptualized and critiqued the conditions of modern life more broadly (as well as the process of historical progress that, for better or worse, had produced these conditions).

In “An Infection of the General Happiness, or the Ecstasy of Frances E. W. Harper,” Lindsay Reckson will explore the biopolitics of Jim Crow secularism, a formation which describes how ideas about racial difference intersected the normative regulation of “healthy” and “pathological” religious expression in the post-Reconstruction era. Reading the church meeting scene at the heart of Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, Reckson will argue that Harper’s depiction of the “infection of the general happiness” disrupts both the legacy of pathologizing Black religion and the racialized governance of “healthy” public religious expression that is an attendant part of that legacy.

Jennifer Fleissner will conclude the panel with her presentation “Autonomy Without Rationality,” which will argue that our standard tendency to invoke (and critique) the “rational autonomous subject” conflates terms that have often in fact been opposed in both philosophical and literary history. The idea of the will, Fleissner will suggest, came into being in early Christianity as a way to explain instances where one did the opposite of what seemed the rational thing to do, and, through Augustine's influence on English Protestantism, this version of it can still be glimpsed across the history of the novel from Robinson Crusoe to Moby-Dick. Many contemporary critical arguments posed against the “rational autonomous subject,” however, conflate rationality with autonomy. Novels like those mentioned thus pose a challenge to both our standard accounts of the “modern individual” as well as to many of our attempts to imagine an alternative thereto.

We are confident that this panel will have broad appeal: not only will it provide a timely reassessment of the role of rationalism in the American nineteenth century; it will also contribute to broader theoretical conversations about the limits of rational humanism as an interpretive framework.