Tradition through Repetition: "The Present Crisis," Social Action, and the Literary Excerpt Genre

Abstract: This essay develops a theory of the literary excerpt, taking as a case study the ways in which James Russell Lowell's 1845 poem "The Present Crisis" has been quoted in public discourse by abolitionists, suffragists, temperance activists, anti-imperialists, and Civil Rights activists including W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr. A prominent recent instance is U.S. Senate Chaplain Barry Black's quotation from the poem in his opening prayer for the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Tracing these and other histories of excerpting "The Present Crisis," the essay draws on Rhetorical Genre Studies to argue that the literary excerpt is a distinct paraliterary genre, a form of social action that enables two purposes: bringing literary authority to nonliterary domains and participating in a tradition through repetition. Attention to the excerpt genre's pragmatics can thus bring the question of instrumentality (back) to considerations of literariness.