Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) October 4, 2021: Harvard's prolific Americanist Perry Miller (1905-1963; Ph.D. in English, University of Chicago, 1931) published his massively researched masterpiece The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century in 1939 (Harvard University Press). In 1942-1945, during World War II, Perry Miller served in the United States Army. In 1953, he published its sequel The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Harvard University Press). Even though Perry Miller wrote extensively about New England over his lifetime, he was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois.
For certain highly specified criticism of Perry Miller's 1939 book, see Norman S. Fiering's article "Will and Intellect in the New England Mind" in the William and Mary Quarterly, third series, volume 29, number 4 (October 1972): pages 515-558, esp. pages 532-533.
In any event, the centuries-old philosophical and theological discussion of the intellect and the will that Fiering perceptively discusses in such detail became known in Melville's time in the simplified terminology of the Head (involving the intellect) and the Heart (involving the feelings and the will) - and Melville famously aligned himself with the Heart, over against the Head.
However, in fairness to Perry Miller, I should point out here that Fiering does not happen to advert to his essays that are relevant to Fiering's larger concerns: "Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening [of 1740]" (1952) and "The Rhetoric of Sensation" (1950), both of which Perry Miller includes in his 1956 essay collection Errand into the Wilderness (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pages 153-166 and 167-183, respectively).
In Melville's ambitious 1851 experimental novel Moby-Dick and in his ambitious 1952 experimental novel Pierre, he in the written verbal pyro-techniques of his writing understandably could not count on the immediacy that Jonathan Edwards could count of in his oral preaching. Nevertheless, Perry Miller's subtle account of Jonathan Edwards' verbal pyro-techniques in his orally delivered but written in advance sermons in "The Rhetoric of Sensation" (1950) is relevant for understanding Melville's rhetoric in his ambitious experimental novels of 1851 and 1852 - and for understanding how his rhetoric is a way of appealing to the Heart (and the Heart's feelings). (I will discuss Perry Miller's 1950 essay "The Rhetoric of Sensation" further below momentarily.)
For more wide-ranging criticism of Perry Miller, see Sacvan Bercovitch's book The American Jeremiad, 2nd ed., with a "Preface to the 2012 Edition" (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012; 1st ed., 1978; see the "Index" for specific pages references to Perry Miller [page 237]).
For a generous assessment of Perry Miller's scholarly artistry in his 1939 book, see Stanford J. Searls' article "Perry Miller as Artist: Piety and Imagination in 'The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century'" in the journal Early American Literature, volume 12, number 3 (Winter 1977/1978): pages 221-233.
For a compilation of reviews of Perry Miller's works and of evaluations of his works, see John C. Crowell's article "Perry Miller as Historian: A Bibliography of Evaluations" in the Bulletin of Bibliography & Magazine Notes, volume 34, number 2 (1977): pages 77-85.
Now, my favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). Perry Miller served as the director of Ong's massively researched Harvard doctoral dissertation about the history of the verbal arts (of grammar, rhetoric, and logic or dialectic) up to and beyond the French Renaissance logician and education reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572).
Perry Miller himself, to the best of his ability, writes about Peter Ramus in his 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (see the "Index" for specific page references to Ramus [pages 404-405]). Perry Miller's 1939 book had come to Ong's attention when he was working on his Master's degree in English (1941) at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri (USA) - as part of Ong's lengthy Jesuit formation. Ong entered the Jesuit novitiate in September 1935. Ong was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. He graduated from the Jesuit high school in Kansas City in 1933.
For further discussion of Ong's life, see my book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication, revised and updated 2nd ed. with a new "Afterword" (New York: Hampton Press, 2015, pages 33-53; 1st ed., 2000).
In any event, in my estimate, certain points that Ong makes in "Rhetoric and the Origins of Consciousness" in his 350-page 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Cornell University Press, pages 1-22) are relevant to Perry Miller's 1950 essay "The Rhetoric of Sensation," discussed above. Ong says the following:
From within our present milieu, Gilbert Durand, in his brilliant psychocultural study, Les Structures anthropologique de l'imaginaire [1960], points out that it is rhetoric which effects the transit from the polysemous sign language of symbols to the formalism of logic, where signs have a 'proper meaning.' With rhetoric, man [sic] sets himself against fate: rhetoric is a movement of hope; an upward movement - a 'euphemism,' Durand calls it, 'which will color in the large all the activity of formalization of thought' [Ong's Englishing of Durand's French on page 451, with Ong's reference to see pages 453-459]. Rhetoric does not grow directly out of the preconceptual but is antithetic to it; it is not so fragmenting, however, as the logic toward which it moves will be. Rhetoric is less preoccupied with distinctions, rather more unifying. It works through the imagination, which euphemizes actuality through hyperbole and antithesis [page 453 and 455]. Rhetoric also schematizes what would otherwise be too fantastic into identifiable figures of style that can be made out to be simple embellishments on formal signification [page 457] (this of course is never so formal as extreme analytic philosophers would make it out to be). Being thus intermediary between stages of the noetic world, rhetoric is full of ambiguities and thus difficult to study in depth, which is why, Durand regretfully suggests, it is given so little philosophical and anthropological attention [page 459]. (pages 12-13)
Ong's 1971 essay "Rhetoric and the Origins of Consciousness" in reprinted in volume four of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999, pages 93-109).
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