Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature

Lindsay V. Reckson

Published by New York University Press 2020

Realist Ecstasy

Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature

Lindsay V. Reckson

Volume 2 in the series Performance and American Cultures

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479803323.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

Honorable Mention, Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theater Research

Explores the intersection and history of American literary realism and the performance of spiritual and racial embodiment.

Recovering a series of ecstatic performances in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realism, Realist Ecstasy travels from camp meetings to Native American ghost dances to storefront church revivals to explore realism’s relationship to spiritual experience. In her approach to realism as both an unruly archive of performance and a wide-ranging repertoire of media practices—including literature, photography, audio recording, and early film—Lindsay V. Reckson argues that the real was repetitively enacted and reenacted through bodily practice. Realist Ecstasy demonstrates how the realist imagining of possessed bodies helped construct and naturalize racial difference, while excavating the complex, shifting, and dynamic possibilities embedded in ecstatic performance: its production of new and immanent forms of being beside.

Across her readings of Stephen Crane, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen, among others, Reckson triangulates secularism, realism, and racial formation in the post-Reconstruction moment. Realist Ecstasy shows how post-Reconstruction realist texts mobilized gestures—especially the gestures associated with religious ecstasy—to racialize secularism itself. Reckson offers us a distinctly new vision of American realism as a performative practice, a sustained account of how performance lives in and through literary archives, and a rich sense of how closely secularization and racialization were linked in Jim Crow America.

Author / Editor information

Reckson Lindsay V. :

Lindsay V. Reckson is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Haverford College.

Reviews

Rebecca Schneider, author of Performing Remains:
This book’s significance lies in Lindsay Reckson’s ability to rethink literary tropes and tactics through a profound attention to embodiment—bodily gesture, comportment, performance, reenactment. Realist Ecstasy traces how bodies come undone into practices that threaten the very category of the real. Theoretically fascinating and solidly grounded, Reckson’s work places performance in conversation with photography and the literary, forcing each to account for one another across her archival ensemble.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: Being Beside Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Reconstructing Secularisms Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	26
2. Archival Enthusiasm Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	68
3. The Ghost Dance and Realism’s Techno- Spiritual Frontier Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
4. Touching a Button Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
5. Born, Again Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	198
Coda: Behind, Before, Beside Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	234
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	305
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	319