Session VII.D. Society for US Intellectual History

Panel Abstract:

This panel will use a historical lens to interrogate the relationship between texts and communities.  Are all communities necessarily communities of discourse?  Following Stanley Fish, are communities of discourse antecedent to the texts they legitimate?  Or do texts legitimate and call forth communities?  Sarah E. Gardner will consider this question in relation to the American Civil War. If the written word failed to unite disparate political and sectional communities during the late antebellum era, it surely triumphed during the war as it created new, perhaps smaller but no less powerful, reading communities.   In her paper, Lora Burnett will examine late 20^th arguments for a necessary connection between common readings and a sense of community.  Ironically, those conducting this debate did not recognize the constitutive nature of the very medium in which the argument took place:  the newspaper.  Both papers raise the question:  in a 21^st century world of textual and communal fragmentation, can the written word function as a force of social cohesion?  Do we want it to?