Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon
EDITED BY ELIZABETH FENTON and JARED HICKMAN
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CONTRIBUTORS
Nancy Bentley is Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her publications include The Ethnography of Manners (1995 and 2007) and Frantic Panoramas: Mass Culture and American Literature, 1870–1920 (2009). She coauthored volume three of The Cambridge History of American Literature (2005) and is currently writing a book entitled New World Kinship and American Literature, a study of the way the novel and other genres mediated the multiple forms of kinship in the Americas in the nineteenth century.
Kimberly M. Berkey is a doctoral student in theology at Loyola University Chicago, where she works in continental philosophy of religion. Berkey holds previous degrees from Brigham Young University and Harvard Divinity School, is the author of several articles on The Book of Mormon, and currently sits on the board of the Mormon Theology Seminar.
Samuel Morris Brown is associate professor of medical ethics and humanities at the University of Utah. This piece is drawn from a book project on the metaphysics of translation in early Mormonism, with an eye toward the nature of the Mormon encounter with secular modernity. He and his wife, Kate Holbrook, are raising three beloved daughters in Salt Lake City.
Peter Coviello is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs, appearing in 2018 from Penguin Books. His next book, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism, will appear in 2019 from the University of Chicago Press. He is professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Amy Easton-Flake is associate professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century women’s reform literature and biblical hermeneutics. Her work may be found in the New England Quarterly; Women’s History Review; Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary
and Cultural Relations; American Journalism, Journal of Mormon History; Journal of Book of Mormon Studies; and multiple edited volumes.
Elizabeth Fenton is professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century US Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2011).
Terryl Givens did graduate work in intellectual history at Cornell and in comparative literature at UNC Chapel Hill, where he received his PhD. He holds the Jabez A. Bostwick Chair of English and is professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond. His several books include a two-volume history of Mormon thought, Wrestling the Angel and Feeding the Flock, a history of the idea of premortal life in Western thought, When Souls Had Wings, and By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a World Religion.
Paul Gutjahr is the Ruth N. Halls Professor of English at Indiana University. His numerous books include An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford University Press, 1999); Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy (Oxford University Press, 2011); The Book of Mormon: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2012); and The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Grant Hardy is professor of history and religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He has authored Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian’s Conquest of History; The Establishment of the Han Empire and Imperial China (with Anne Behnke Kinney); and Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide. He has also edited The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Edition, the Maxwell Institute Study Edition Book of Mormon, and coedited the Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 1.
Jared Hickman is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2016) and coeditor (with Martha Schoolman) of Abolitionist Places (Routledge, 2016).
Zachary McLeod Hutchins is associate professor of English at Colorado State University. He is the author of Inventing Eden: Primitivism, Millennialism, and the Making of New England (Oxford University Press, 2014) and coeditor of The Writings of Elizabeth Webb: A Quaker Missionary in America, 1697–1726 (Pennsylvania State University, 2019). His essays on literature and Mormonism have appeared in collections published by Cambridge University Press, Northwestern University Press, and the University of Massachusetts Press.
Jillian Sayre is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden, where she teaches American literature and literary theory. Her recent work appears in Early American Literature, Inventing Place: Writing Lone Star Rhetorics, and Networked Humanities: Within and Without the University. Her work on The Book of Mormon and early Mormon Church history forms part of her current monograph Mourning the Nation to Come (LSU Press, 2019).
Laura Thiemann Scales is associate professor of English at Stonehill College. She has published essays on Nat Turner, Joseph Smith, and the rise of Mormonism. Her current book project examines prophecy and narrative voice in nineteenthcentury American literature and culture.
Eran Shalev is chair of the history department at Haifa University and author of American Zion: The Bible as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2012) and Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Virginia University Press, 2009).
Grant Shreve is an independent scholar and writer living in Baltimore, Maryland. He holds a PhD in American literature from Johns Hopkins University. His work has previously appeared in Religion & Politics, Religion Dispatches, American Literary History, and American Literature.
Joseph M. Spencer is assistant professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University, where his research focuses on both Mormon scripture and contemporary European philosophy. He is the author or editor of several books and numerous articles and is currently the editor of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. He serves also as the associate director of the Mormon Theology Seminar and is series editor, with Matthew Bowman, of Introductions to Mormon Thought, published by the University of Illinois Press. He and Karen, his wife, live in Provo, Utah, with their children.
Stanley J. Thayne is a visiting assistant professor of anthropology and religion at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.
Edward Whitley is professor of English at Lehigh University. He is the author of American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) and the coeditor of Whitman Among the Bohemians (University of Iowa Press, 2014) and Walt Whitman in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2018), both with Joanna Levin. With Robert Weidman, he codirects the website The Vault at Pfaff’s (lehigh.edu/pfaffs).
R. John Williams is associate professor at Yale University where he teaches in the departments of English and film and media studies. He is the author of The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology and the Meeting of East and West (Yale University Press, 2014). His recent work has focused on new theories of time that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in the rise of futurology and theories of “presence.” An article from this new project has appeared in Critical Inquiry and another is forthcoming in a volume titled Futures (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). He is also a participant in the program for Public Theologies of Technology and Presence at the Institute of Buddhist Studies.
Introduction
Learning to Read With The Book of Mormon
Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman
The Book of Mormon has simultaneously been all too difficult and all too easy for Americanist literary critics to engage. This catch-22 is evinced by the clockwork reiteration, at least once every generation, of a specific scholarly gesture that combines dutiful nomination of and practical inattention to The Book of Mormon as an object of Americanist literary study.1 To be blunt, professors of American literature seem to have recognized they have every reason to devote their best efforts to what is arguably “the only important second Bible produced in this country” and “the foundational document” of what is undeniably “one of the nation’s most successful, domestically produced religions”; but they evidently have had just as many reasons not to.2 This predicament has much to do with the story of The Book of Mormon’s emergence, which, by now, thanks to the likes of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Broadway musical, is a relatively familiar feature of the American cultural landscape. In September 1823, Joseph Smith, Jr. reportedly received a visit from an ancient American prophet named Moroni, who informed Smith that, 1,400 years earlier, he had buried the sacred record of his people in a hillside near Smith’s home in upstate New York. Four years later, in September 1827, after various experiences scrying for treasure with a “seerstone,” Smith claimed to have recovered that record in the form of golden plates, as well as related artifacts, including an apparatus (called “the interpreters” or, using biblical terminology, Urim and Thummim) understood to enable Smith to “translate” the plate text from a language called “reformed Egyptian” into English. After a false start involving the loss of 116 manuscript pages, The Book of Mormon as we have it seems largely to have been produced at a remarkable pace between April and June 1829, with Smith dictating the text—typically with the aid of his seerstone
Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Introduction:LearningtoReadWithTheBookofMormon. In: AmericanistApproachestoTheBookofMormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0001
and without any direct consultation of the ostensible original, the plates—to his main scribe, Oliver Cowdery.3
The final product, published in March 1830 by E. B. Grandin in Palmyra, New York, was a 600-page tome narrating, in the main, the 1,000-year history of a group of Israelites who, in advance of the diaspora forced by the Babylonian invasion, escaped to the Americas around 600 BCE. Although The Book of Mormon adduces additional Old World migrations to the New, the primary story it tells begins and ends with a single family, led by the visionary patriarch Lehi, whose progeny divide into two opposed factions—Nephites, named for his obedient son Nephi, and the Lamanites, named for a son who rebels, Laman. This spiritual distinction is underscored in the text in two ways: by privileging the Nephite perspective—they are the narrators of The Book of Mormon; and by racializing the Lamanites as undesirably nonwhite—the Nephite narrative describes them as “curs[ed]” with “a skin of blackness.”4 However, the text also undermines this distinction: by depicting phases of Lamanite righteousness and Nephite wickedness, but, above all, by having the Lamanites eventually emerge, within the narrative frame, as the victors of a millennium of intermittent warfare and by making their descendants—widely understood by early Mormons to be contemporary Native Americans—the narrative’s most pertinent addressees.5 By relating this saga of a “broken off” “branch” of the house of Israel (1 Ne 10:12, 15:12, 19:23–24; 2 Ne 3:5, 10:22), The Book of Mormon recenters JudeoChristian sacred history in the Americas, most overtly in its account of the personal ministry in the Western Hemisphere of the resurrected Christ, who reveals that the New Jerusalem of his Second Coming will be headquartered in the New rather than Old World.6 Furthermore, The Book of Mormon constructs its own “coming forth” as an eschatological event: an inauguration of a millennial American present by way of a revelation of the American past. And—crucially— not to forget: By the time of Smith’s death just fourteen years later in June 1844, this kingdom of God on earth was being actively built—much to the unsettlement of many Americans—by as many as 25,000 people.7
On the basis of that brief description, one can perhaps readily see why The Book of Mormon has been deemed by many Americanist scholars as either too hot to handle or unworthy of handling with care. Since its appearance, The Book of Mormon has been inextricably entangled with the project of appraising the religious movement whose most familiar name, not coincidentally, is drawn from the text: Mormonism8. More specifically, Joseph Smith’s prophetic legitimacy has been understood by many to hinge on the authenticity of the claims he and others made about the text’s provenance—namely, that it was a divinely aided translation of a genuine ancient document relaying actual historical events. Evidence of Book of Mormon antiquity has been mobilized to vindicate Smith on two fronts: more weakly, in the negative, to disprove allegations of malfeasance
and misrepresentation in his account of the plates and their translation that might call into question his character; more strongly, in the affirmative, to posit that the only explanation for apparently antique elements in The Book of Mormon is ultimately a supernatural one proving Smith to have been miraculously touched by God in some way.9 By the same token, evidence of Book of Mormon modernity has been made to incriminate Smith as, at best, a “pious fraud”—someone who came to justify, perhaps even partly believe in, what is understood to be, fundamentally, the lie that the text was other than a mundane contemporary composition, his own and/or others.10
Because of these particulars of the text’s publication and dissemination, The Book of Mormon has tended to neatly demarcate “religious” and “secularist” interpretive positions along a temporal axis: To accept the antiquity Smith and others seemed to allege for The Book of Mormon was (and often still is) to recognize oneself as a believer, a “Mormon”;11 to commonsensically assume the modernity of the text was (and often still is) to call Joseph Smith a deceiver in some measure and mark oneself as a disbeliever, at times even an anti-Mormon of some stripe.12 This hermeneutical dualism has tended to transform all discussants of the text into either debunkers or defenders of the Mormon faith. Consequently, academic study of The Book of Mormon typically has been cowed or co-opted by the charged theological questions surrounding the text’s historical status. In this scheme, the Americanist who might think of putting The Book of Mormon on her research agenda or syllabus is placed in either the uncomfortable or the alltoo-comfortable position of taking a polemical stance: To historicize The Book of Mormon as nineteenth-century American literature may seem to entail a secularist dismissal of Mormonism’s faith claims. The consequences for The Book of Mormon are bad either way: The Americanist scholar disinclined to resume the allotted role of philosophe discrediting a text sacralized by a religious community probably just won’t read it; and the Americanist scholar keen to resume that role is likely to produce an ungenerous and shallowly topical reading presupposing the moral and aesthetic thinness of the text.
On this last point, one might discern how The Book of Mormon has, on the other hand, been all too easy for nineteenth-century Americanists to take up. Insofar as reading of The Book of Mormon has largely been mediated by questions about the marvelous historicity Smith and early Mormons imputed to it, a preeminent form of “secularist” reading of the text has been to see it as an indiscriminate catch-all of nineteenth-century Americana. This precedent was set in one of the earliest sustained critical engagements with the text, competing Christian restorationist Alexander Campbell’s 1832 Delusions, which argued The Book of Mormon contained “every error and almost every truth discussed in N. York for the last ten years. [Smith] decides all the great controversies—infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the
atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man.”13 More than 100 years later, in what registers as one of the first mainstream recommendations of The Book of Mormon for serious scholarly study, Fawn Brodie struck the same note, although she altered somewhat its timbre: The Book of Mormon, she wrote, “can best be explained, not by Joseph’s ignorance nor by his delusions [here she is certainly conversing with Campbell], but by his responsiveness to the provincial opinions of his time. He had neither the diligence nor the constancy to master reality, but his mind was open to all intellectual influences, from whatever province they might blow.”14
Under this paradigm, Joseph Smith is a tabula rasa for the nineteenth-century American context at large and The Book of Mormon is not Smith’s translation of plates engraved by ancient American prophets but rather a record of his own inscription—indeed, his overwriting—by the history immediately around him. Much of the scant Americanist work on The Book of Mormon has proceeded on this model, treating the text piecemeal as a kind of handy prooftext for whatever one’s historical thesis about nineteenth-century America is, as though it’s somehow all in there. There’s no denying that The Book of Mormon can indeed seem like something cooked up after hours at a conference of nineteenth-century Americanists, an object almost too good to be true. Just consider: At a fraught postcolonial—and neocolonial—moment of the US’s world-historical arrival, at the opening of the era of literary nationalism, here comes an epic history of the Israelite inhabitants of ancient America, endowing the New World with Old World heft, supplying not only a millennial present (these were a dime a dozen) but an extravagant ancient past that presages that millennial present; and then consider that these ancient American Israelites were taken to be the ancestors of contemporary American Indians, thereby registering the complex links between settler and Native nationalisms.15 From such an angle, The Book of Mormon almost too brazenly serves itself on a platter to Americanists.
Notably, these two hermeneutical poles—of “religious” conviction in the robustness of the text’s antiquity and “secularist” considerations of the repleteness of the text’s modernity—align in denying Smith and the text any complex agency in representing and intervening in history. The text is either Smith’s mere reading-off of words God projected onto the seerstone in order to recover more or less wholesale a long-lost ancient world or a simple relay via Smith of gardenvariety nineteenth-century American discourses.16 To put this in literary–critical parlance, The Book of Mormon has until quite recently been subject to the crudest kind of “symptomatic reading.” By symptomatic reading, we here mean a basically historicist mode of interpretation that understands texts to be definitively shaped, in the final analysis, by the societal structures within which their authors
produce them and their readers take them up. In the finest versions of symptomatic reading, these societal structures are specified with real acuity: Texts are convincingly made sensitive barometers of their contexts—of incipient contradictions in the socioeconomic order or of emergent discourses aiming to discipline reality through the forceful performance of language and gesture. But because of the basic source problems attending its transmission, The Book of Mormon has not elicited such subtlety. Rather, symptomatic reading has been solicited and riveted by the grossest historical question: Which of these wildly disparate contexts—ancient indigenous Meso-America or the modern settlercolonial United States—does The Book of Mormon symptomatize? The resulting tendency has been to mine the text for evidence of either context, heaping facts to establish a foundation on which analysis of the text qua text should proceed. Common to these approaches, as Grant Hardy puts it, is “the urge to start with something outside the Book of Mormon.”17 As such, Book of Mormon criticism might be seen as exposing the elementary assumptions of symptomatic reading by staging an extreme and thus elucidating demonstration of what historicizing a text may, in the end, entail—reducing a text and its author(s) to their context. By now it should be clear that at least one merit of The Book of Mormon is how the peculiar history of its production and reception provokes reflections on literary–critical method: What constitutes a text? Its context? Its author? Its readers? Hence, it perhaps should not be a surprise that the most recent developments in Book of Mormon criticism have taken a correspondently extreme form of the interpretive ethos Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus have polemically opposed to symptomatic reading: “surface reading.”18 Common to the range of approaches they group under its aegis—from big-data digital humanities projects to intensely self-conscious affective engagements—surface reading involves a recommitment to the text as a knowing and forthcoming rather than self-deceived and cagey source of information about its provenance and intended effects: “texts can reveal their own truths because texts mediate themselves; what we think theory brings to texts (form, structure, meaning) is already present in them . . . . The purpose of criticism is thus a relatively modest one: to indicate what the text says about itself.”19 Although not necessarily antihistoricist—and, indeed, arguably compatible with an ostensibly more inductive historicism that takes the text to immanently mediate its own historicization, surface reading is explicitly presented by Best and Marcus as a deflection of the famous dictum of their symptomatic reader par excellence, Fredric Jameson: “always historicize.”20 At the least, then, by suggesting one might sometimes not historicize, surface reading leaves the door open to the formalist reading practices against which symptomatic reading, in its Marxist and poststructuralist variants, arrayed itself: that is, reading texts as (though) independent or at least insulated from their contexts (a mode associated with the terms “close reading” and
“practical criticism”). (And indeed the so-called new formalism is one of the interpretive strategies Best and Marcus gather under their umbrella term.)21
In typically ultraist fashion, an emergent strain of Book of Mormon criticism has expressed this tendency by reverting to a rather arch form of such close reading precisely in the name of evading the historical controversy that, we have seen, has surrounded The Book of Mormon from its appearance.22 Importantly, the premise of this criticism is The Book of Mormon’s evident meaningfulness as scripture to what has arguably become a “world religion.”23 The historical fortunes of The Book of Mormon and its eponymous denomination—the fact that the text, unlike other modern scriptures, has lived on through a devoted readership—are leveraged toward affording The Book of Mormon a special nonhistoricist treatment reserved for other such religious texts within certain sectors of the academy. As part of a canon of world scripture, The Book of Mormon, like the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita, is made available for reading “as literature,” apart from the specific historical and theological claims its pertinent religious communities have attached to it. Put another way, The Book of Mormon’s demonstrable achievement of scripturality becomes a platform for projecting the text’s presumptive aesthetic and moral value (i.e., if so many people have found such meaning in it, mustn’t there be something to it?). Having equipped readers with the expectation of finding such value, such criticism can then invite those outside the communities who revere the text as scripture to invest and even participate in the process of elucidating that value. The Book of Mormon is thus transformed into a text that will reward serious “literary” reading, regardless of the reader’s relationship to the text’s namesake religious tradition, Mormonism. In this arrangement, the historicity question that has defined and confined discussion of The Book of Mormon is theoretically “bracketed,” to use Grant Hardy’s term, and a newly rigorous and freshly vigorous formalist anatomization of the text can proceed from various quarters.24 In sum, a new regime of surface reading the text—of reading the text unburdened by “a theoretical or historical metalanguage”—is seemingly made possible.25
However, as many critics of Best and Marcus’s surface reading thesis have intimated, it is not clear that reading should or even could suspend the historicizing impulse.26 Symptomatic and surface reading might be better understood in a richly dialectical rather than flatly opposite relation.27 In other words, these two modes of interpretation might be seen as feeding into each other in a manner analogous to or convergent upon Hans-Georg Gadamer’s classic account of the “hermeneutic circle” as a constant shuttling between two different positions on two different scales: one, between the constituent part of the text and the whole of the text; and, two, between the text’s and the reader’s respective historical horizons.28 Further, rather than permanently polarize these approaches, one might see how each is arguably called for at different times
in a particular text’s reception history—that when certain established ways of reading a text are perceived as having obscured key elements of the text, a recommitment to the primariness of the primary text is justified, which of course skews the secondary field in different directions, requiring subsequent recommitments to the primary text. Indeed, this seems a working description of how the business of literary criticism actually works.29 Hence, in the case of The Book of Mormon, the argument can be made that the avowedly historically agnostic close reading modeled by Hardy is a salutary corrective at a particular moment insofar as it opens up space to see new things in and say new things about the text. But the process should not—and perhaps cannot—stop there. In fact, as some reviewers of Hardy’s work have observed, his own keen narratological and characterological explorations of The Book of Mormon often seem tacitly to presume or even slyly to project the antiquity of the text—in other words, to decide rather than defer the historicity question.30
But it is actually a stronger point we’d like to make here. Book of Mormon criticism again epitomizes, or uncannily hyperbolizes, broad movements in literary theory by pointing the way toward a more dialectical reading practice. In some of the work produced under the new regime of surface reading The Book of Mormon, for instance Joseph Spencer’s, which, like Hardy’s, predicates itself on the treatment of The Book of Mormon as scripture and purports to privilege—as Earl Wunderli has put it—“what the Book of Mormon tells us about itself,” a paradoxical truth emerges: A surface reading of The Book of Mormon is bound to foreground rather than foreclose the historicity question by showing just how constitutively the text itself is engaged in a bold experiment in historicization.31 The thesis here is simple: An attentive surface reading of The Book of Mormon shows that it arguably never portrays itself as an ancient text, that is, a text in any conventional sense composed within and thus conditioned by the limited spatiotemporal context of seventh-century BCE Palestine or third-century CE Central America. Rather, The Book of Mormon is a remarkably assured and comprehensive prolepsis. Its anachronism is unembarrassedly integral. After all, the book’s point of departure is Lehi’s visionary apprehension of the imminent Babylonian captivity, which is revealed to him in the pages of a book that is given to him by twelve angelic figures who, we are told, appear following “One descending out of the midst of heaven . . . [whose] luster was above that of the sun at noon-day” (1 Ne 1:9–11). In other words, Lehi is warned of the Babylonian captivity thirteen years before it happens by way of a book given him by men who will not be born for another 600 years—Jesus and his apostles. The Book of Mormon is a wormhole right from the get-go—its temporality is never anything but extravagantly nonlinear.
Just consider: By the end of the 32nd of 239 total chapters (in post-1879 editions) and only 40 or so years into its 1000-year main narrative, that is, only
1/8 of the way into the text and 1/25 into the time span of its main narrative (around 560 BCE, according to the text’s internal chronology), the Nephite narrators can already do the following: (1) worship Jesus Christ by name (2 Ne 10:3), which includes foreknowledge of his birth by a virgin, baptism, crucifixion, and resurrection, and a thoroughly developed Christian soteriology (a conception of how Jesus is “the savior of the world”); (2) anticipate their own extinction at the hands of their “brethren,” the dark-skinned Lamanites, 1,000 years later around 420 CE, thereby “spoiling” the narrative, for this is how it inevitably ends (1 Ne 12:19–20); and (3) foresee the eventual recovery of their record 2,500 years later by a “seer” named “Joseph,” an event that is imagined as transforming nineteenth-century America (2 Ne 3). The Book of Mormon is a sustained exercise in—to borrow a phrase from one of its prophetic figures, Abinadi—“speaking of things to come as though they had already come,” and this formal feature, apart from what it might suggest about Book of Mormon authorship, defines the text (Mosiah 16:6). This effect is fascinatingly compounded by the apparently nonlinear dictation of the extant text, which began around what is now Mosiah 8 and then doubled back to 1 Nephi.32
A strong reading of The Book of Mormon’s comprehensive prolepsis might even lead us to suggest that the text itself supplies as the context of both its reception and production a spatiotemporal frame that far exceeds that of the ancient Near East or a diaspora of ancient Near Eastern peoples in the Americas. Pertinent here is the opposite bookend of Lehi’s vision in 1 Ne 1: Moroni’s peroration upon burying the records. “O ye wicked and perverse and stiffnecked people,” he writes,
I speak unto you as if ye were present, and yet ye are not. But behold, Jesus Christ hath shown you unto me, and I know your doing. And I know that ye do walk in the pride of your hearts . . . . For behold, ye do love money, and your substance, and your fine apparel, and the adorning of your churches, more than ye love the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted. (Morm 8:33, 35–37)
What is suggested here is that the narrators of The Book of Mormon foresee the American nineteenth century with such clarity as, in some sense, to inhabit it and to be formed by it. Implicit if not explicit in this passage is that the moral and narrative content of The Book of Mormon is shaped by the narrators’ professed foreknowledge of the American nineteenth century into which their book will come forth. If we provisionally embrace the ethic of surface reading, the forthrightness, even the flamboyance, of The Book of Mormon’s anachronism can be taken first and foremost as the book’s own instruction for how it is to be read. That is, the text is self-consciously and committedly anachronistic
and asks to be entertained as such. This interpretive possibility explodes the hermeneutical dualism that has until now largely prevailed, for many Mormon readers and most non-Mormon readers have often operated on the premise that the text’s anachronism is at odds with rather than at the very heart of the text’s claims. More precisely, both have regarded the text’s burden to be to validate its alleged antiquity and assumed that The Book of Mormon asks to be read as an ancient text. This anachronism becomes a certain sort of non-Mormon reader’s proof of The Book of Mormon’s nonantiquity and that which has to be explained away as nonexistent or nonessential by a Mormon reader who is invested in The Book of Mormon’s antiquity. What we are suggesting, by contrast, is that The Book of Mormon, in its ostentatious anachronism, may not be asking to be read this way at all.
If this premise is granted, the historicity debate suddenly looks quite different. Specifically, arguments for The Book of Mormon’s modernity become depolemicized to the extent it is conceded that the text actually does not pretend to be ancient or artifactual but rather flaunts the fact that its narrative form and content are ultimately determined by an implied reader—or, more strongly, a prophetically presenced reader—that is modern. The question of how the text comes by its modernity—whether through the acuity of ancient American prophecy or the fecundity of Joseph Smith’s modern American creativity— need not overshadow the fact that the text asserts with perfect candor that its implied readers are nineteenth-century Americans. A reading of The Book of Mormon as nineteenth-century American literature thus need not be either an uncomfortably provocative or all-too-comfortably skeptical reading against the grain but might also be an earnestly interrogative reading in the grain. A consideration of The Book of Mormon as a nineteenth-century text suddenly ceases necessarily to lapse into the juvenile mode of exposé. Sensitive and circumspect Americanists—or less charitable and patient Americanists simply put off by the thicket of controversy surrounding The Book of Mormon can reconceptualize their default approach to the text not as a resistant reading against the grain but as a respectful reading in the grain. One could say that Americanists are only doing what The Book of Mormon asks by reading it as a text that speaks primarily to the American nineteenth century in which it knew, so to speak, it would come forth.
More precisely, Americanist approaches to The Book of Mormon might be seen as entirely justified by The Book of Mormon’s own approach of the Americanist enterprise—understood as an attempt to make sense of something called “America.” For even as The Book of Mormon refuses to be read as a text squarely anchored in an ancient context, it also eschews a normal relation to its modern context—that is, as just another cultural product of its particular swath of empty homogenous time. Rather, it articulates and embodies a strong reading of Joseph
Smith’s America as an eschatological prism through which the past can be seen to be seeking its fulfillment in the present and the present finding its fulfillment in the past. In other words, following Walter Benjamin’s construal of the messianic, The Book of Mormon openly aspires to be metahistory—a radical rewriting and alternative enactment of history in light of a specific defiant fact: the persistence of Native legacies and lives in the face of Euro-Christian settler colonialism in the Americas.33 The Book of Mormon is a portal to a new historiography and inhabitation of time constellated around the world-historical event of indigenous survivance of genocide in the Western Hemisphere. It is Americanist work of an especially ambitious—and, more than ever, relevant—sort.34 Hence, there is no escaping historicity when it comes to The Book of Mormon, but the specific historicity question that has dominated the text’s discussion—is it a raging symptom of the ancient milieu its narrative world may seem to evoke or the modern milieu in which it came forth?—can be radically reframed by way of a surface reading of the text’s fruitful obsession with tracing time’s movement, specifically toward what is asserted to be a point of potentially clarifying culmination in nineteenthcentury America. By revealing how actively and creatively The Book of Mormon itself historicizes, such a surface reading may in turn facilitate a finer symptomatic reading of The Book of Mormon, a more granular historicization of the profundity of the text’s own work of historicization that may teach us a great deal about the pasts, presents, and futures that might be gathered under the rubric of “America.” It is here, at this point, that the work of this collection begins. The contributors to this volume, despite their manifest differences of orientation, can be seen to join hands in realizing The Book of Mormon’s capacity to sustain the most original and searching Americanist inquiry by, first and foremost, recognizing the text’s own such inquiry.
The authors of this collection’s essays approach The Book of Mormon from a variety of methodological and theological perspectives, but all share a commitment to taking seriously the book’s relationship to and impact on the culture into which it emerged. The works in this volume thus speak to each other, at times directly, in fruitful ways, and we have arranged them into sections to highlight some of their most compelling shared concerns. The Book of Mormon’s status as an object always has held deep significance to believers and detractors alike. Metal plates, handwritten translations, missing pages—all have borne as much significance to the book’s reception as its contents. The essays in our first section contend with The Book of Mormon’s vexed materiality, assessing the relationship between the book’s various physical manifestations and the meaning it has generated over time. Jillian Sayre shows how Smith’s text and other early Mormon writings create an affective link between past and present in the service of an impending messianic future; in so doing, she highlights and critiques the tacitly secular assumptions of previous theories of print culture —particularly
those following Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities.” Demonstrating the always-permeable relationship between “text” (the contents or ostensible “inside” of a book) and “paratext” (all of its framing, “outside” features), R. John Williams resists the notion of sidelining history when approaching Smith’s text, and he treats The Book of Mormon as a case study in the impossibility of delineating the boundaries of any book. Paul Gutjahr’s piece focuses on the role a single editor, Orson Pratt, showing that editions of the book produced after Smith’s death reflect Pratt’s investments in systematic theology and scientific epistemology. Though its status as a sacred text might seem to set it apart from human designs, The Book of Mormon never has been a static document, and the essays in this section all take revealing approaches to its textual history.
Of prime importance to any understanding of The Book of Mormon is recognition of its status as a sacred text. As the essays in this book’s second section collectively demonstrate, though, The Book of Mormon’s relationship to the scriptural record is anything but simple, and its overt religiosity does not prevent it from engaging with the issue of secularism. Examining some of the book’s most explicit engagements with the King James Bible, Grant Hardy argues that The Book of Mormon not only stands as a scripture itself but also creates a world in which scriptural texts can proliferate. Intertextuality, anachronism, and wordplay, Hardy suggests, are not accidental to the text but intrinsic to its aims; at the heart of The Book of Mormon lies a notion of the divine that delights in linguistic and narrative creativity. Eran Shalev examines the tradition of biblical imitation in texts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although it shared much with its pseudo-biblical predecessors, The Book of Mormon fundamentally changed the landscape around these texts, because it claimed that its language was authentic rather than metaphorical—in so doing, it may have rendered the genre obsolete. Drawing on the long philosophical tradition grappling with the distinctions between speech and text, Samuel Brown argues that The Book of Mormon generates a symbiotic relationship between the two. This merging, he suggests, simultaneously allows The Book of Mormon to suggest that all scripture requires a supplement and to bridge the distance between the human and the divine. In an essay also concerned with The Book of Mormon’s relationship to the act of writing, Laura Thiemann Scales contends that the recognition of textual mediation is central to its theory of prophecy. Through an assessment of the text’s complicated uses of narration, Scales shows that the commingling of human and divine voices does not undercut the book’s claims regarding personal revelation but instead operates as an essential component of its theological mission. Examining the world of dissent and religious argument that emerges among the Nephites, Grant Shreve shows how the text defines a public sphere in which competing voices jockey for acceptance in the absence of traditional religious institutions. Rather than simply
presenting secularism as the endpoint of modernity, though, The Book of Mormon simultaneously considers how revelation might intervene in human history and convert all choices into a singular option.
The Book of Mormon is undeniably and deeply concerned with the status of indigenous peoples on the American continent, in ancient times as well as the nineteenth century Smith inhabited. The essays in this book’s third section thus address The Book of Mormon’s depictions of Amerindian peoples and the ongoing efforts to grapple with its unsettling accounts of colonialism, violence, and racial and sexual differences. Reading The Book of Mormon within a larger cultural conversation about the structure of kinship—one heavily influenced by white notions of indigenous family structures—and the links between the living and the dead, Nancy Bentley argues that the book stands not as a relic of ancient ways of being but rather as a new expression of modern subjectivity. Peter Coviello reconsiders The Book of Mormon’s fraught depictions of race within the context of early Mormon negotiations of the nation-state’s multilayered alignment of whiteness with particular structures of sex, gender, and secularity. The Mormon entrance into whiteness, he argues, required more than a simple adoption of “racism” and was, in fact, a brutal and perilous process highlighting the intersectionality of sex and religion with American notions of race. Elizabeth Fenton examines the relationship between Smith’s text and contemporary theories regarding the history of indigenous American populations. Focusing particularly on the theory that Americans descended from the lost Ten Tribes of Israel—a theory The Book of Mormon explicitly rejects—Fenton argues that the book presents Christianity as a belief system with numerous, independent points of origin while simultaneously deferring the millennial end it forcefully predicts. Focusing on Samuel the Lamanite’s reworking of Matthew 23–24 (which appears in the Book of Helaman), Joseph Spencer and Kimberly Berkey excavate The Book of Mormon’s subtle but nevertheless present interest in the intersectionality of race and sex. Unique in this collection is Stanley Thayne’s work, which takes an ethnographic approach to contemporary Native American interpretations of The Book of Mormon. Through interviews with an LDS member of the Catawba Nation, Thayne shows how one reader grapples with the intricacies of overlapping identities to produce a reading of the text that is at once local and hemispheric, Mormon and indigenous, past and future oriented. The essays in the final section of this collection engage with The Book of Mormon as a site of cultural production, both operating in conjunction with existing genres and producing new ones in its wake. Terryl Givens situates the text within broader Christian debates about the primacy of grace and works within the framework of salvation to show how it addresses the lack of assurance endemic to most Protestant belief systems. Although the book itself does not offer certitudo salutis, it does, through an innovative literalization of covenant
theology, satisfy a yearning for deliverance and a will to connect with the divine. Amy Easton-Flake’s essay also highlights The Book of Mormon’s cultural innovation, noting that, against the grain of a society that positioned women and mothers as the moral centers of the home, it insists that men and fathers take the lead in religious instruction. Reading the text alongside conduct manuals of the era, Easton-Flake shows that The Book of Mormon might itself be read as a kind of guide for faithful men who would assume an active role in familial religious life. Focusing on The Book of Mormon’s prophecy regarding Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, Zachary Hutchins suggests that the text uses Columbus to foreground the imperfect and always incomplete nature of revelation. Columbus’s significance within Smith’s text and the works that follow from it, including those by Mormon author Orson Scott Card, might be read as an evocation of the possibility that terrible error and fallibility are embedded within the structure of revealed religion. And finally, Edward Whitley explores the rich tradition of poetic writing inspired by The Book of Mormon. Examining a variety of poetic genres, from the elegy to the epic, Whitley suggests that Book of Mormon poetry offers readers a theory of history in which time is neither linear nor progressive. By calling forth a past to speak in the present, these poems highlight The Book of Mormon’s own construction of temporal plurality and recursive history.
We have made some editorial decisions for this volume that bear mentioning. There are numerous editions of The Book of Mormon available to readers, and so in the interest of uniformity we have asked our contributors to use Royal Skousen’s The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text for citations. Skousen’s edition is the product of a years-long, meticulous study of Joseph Smith’s original manuscripts, and it is the most accurate version of the text to date. It not only corrects errors that have appeared in other editions of the book (largely because of typesetting mistakes) but also stands as an accessible scholarly rendering of the work. In the interest of making our own book accessible to readers, though, we have asked our contributors to use chapter and verse format rather than page numbers when citing the The Book of Mormon; this way, readers may refer to whatever copy of the book they happen to have on their shelves. We also have opted to italicize the title of The Book of Mormon and capitalize its initial article throughout the volume. Some readers may find this typographical choice a bit jarring, as much writing about the book follows the convention of rendering scriptural titles in roman type and presenting their initial article in lowercase (as with the Bible or the Quran). Our choice reflects a desire to remain as neutral as possible on the question of The Book of Mormon’s truth claims by following the convention for printing the title of a long work of verse or prose. The aim of this collection is to assess the book within the context of nineteenth-century Americanist inquiry, and the typography reflects this. Finally, except where it would cause confusion, the essays in this collection will follow the convention of
referring to authors, editors, and other public figures by their last names. Joseph Smith, Jr. thus will appear simply as “Smith” in most cases.
Notes
1. 1945: “Scholars of American literary history have remained persistently uninterested in the Book of Mormon. Their indifference is the more surprising since the book is one of the earliest examples of frontier fiction, the first long Yankee narrative that owes nothing to English literary fashions.” Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York: Vintage, 1995), 67.
1957: “The Book of Mormon has not been universally considered by its critics as one of those books that must be read in order to have an opinion of it.” Thomas O’Dea, The Mormons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 26.
1980: “The Book of Mormon brought to the surface underlying currents of American folk thought that cannot be found in the learned pamphlets or public orations of the day. It reveals in fact just how limited and elitist our understanding of early nineteenth-century popular culture really is. The Book of Mormon is an extraordinary work of popular imagination and one of the greatest documents in American cultural history.” Gordon S. Wood, “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism,” New York History 61.4 (Oct. 1980): 381.
1986: [In a chapter on “literary scripturism” in the American Renaissance]: “The new bible did not get written [in the antebellum United States] unless one counts The Book of Mormon” [of which there is no subsequent discussion]. Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 183.
1989: “For all the attention given to the study of Mormonism, surprisingly little has been devoted to the Book of Mormon itself.” Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 115.
1992: “There is no figure remotely like [Joseph Smith] in our entire national history, and it is unlikely that anyone like him ever can come again. Most Americans have never heard of him, and most of those who have remember him as a fascinating scamp or charlatan who invented the story of the Angel Moroni and the gold plates, and then forged the Book of Mormon as a follow-up. Since the Book of Mormon, more even than the King James Bible, exists in more unread copies than any other work, that is poor fame indeed for a charismatic unmatched in our history.” Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 126–127.
2007: “The Book of Mormon should rank among the great achievements of American literature, but it has never been accorded the status it deserves, since Mormons deny Joseph Smith’s authorship, and non-Mormons, dismissing the work as a fraud, have been more likely to ridicule than read it.” Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 314.
2013: [After quoting Hatch]: “If scholars of American religious cultures have focused on The Book of Mormon’s composition and reception, literary critics have ignored the text almost entirely.” Elizabeth Fenton, “Open Canons: Sacred History and American History in The Book of Mormon,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1.2 (Fall 2013): 342.
2016: “Despite the intensification of interest in Mormon culture and doctrine, however, there has been very little mainstream scholarly attention paid to The Book of Mormon itself . . . [quotation of O’Dea]. To date, the academy has focused on The Book of Mormon as a historical object and as the occasion for a broader consideration for Mormon culture. There has been important work in the last two decades on Mormon doctrine, the historical place of Joseph Smith and Mormonism in early American religious culture, the origin story for The Book of Mormon, and The Book of Mormon as an object in print history. But until quite recently, the text between the covers has been largely ignored by non-LDS scholars.” Laura Thiemann Scales, “A New ‘Mormon Moment’: The Book of Mormon in Literary Studies,” Literature Compass 13.11 (Nov. 2016): 735–743.
2. Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of Latter-day Saints in American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 41; Fenton, “Open Canons,” 341.
3. For broad accounts of the translation process that synthesize the relevant primary and secondary sources, see Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 57–108; Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8–42; for a bold new theory of Book of Mormon translation that sympathetically regards Smith’s creative role, see Ann Taves, “History and the Claims of Revelation: Joseph Smith and the Materialization of the Golden Plates,” Numen 61 (2014): 182–207; for the latest considerations of what “translation” may have meant to Smith, see Michael Hubbard Mackay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid, eds., Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects and the Making of Mormonism (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, forthcoming); for a useful contextualization of Smith’s treasure-seeking activities, see Alan Taylor, “The Early Republic’s Supernatural Economy: Treasure Seeking in the American Northeast,1780–1830,” American Quarterly 38.1 (Spring 1986): 6–34; for a review of the particulars of Smith’s treasure seeking, see Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 41–52; for a more in-depth consideration, see Mark Ashurst-McGee, “A Pathway to Prophethood: Joseph Smith as Rodsman, Village Seer, and Judeo-Christian Prophet” (M.A. thesis, Utah State University, 2000); Michael D. Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1998), esp. 30–65.
4. Royal Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 90; 2 Ne 5:21. Following Skousen’s own admission into his critical text of Orson Pratt’s 1879 editing of The Book of Mormon into chapter and verse, subsequent citations will be made parenthetically by book, chapter, and verse.
5. On race and the theopolitics of form in The Book of Mormon, see Jared Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Literature 86.3 (Sep. 2014): 429–461.
6. According to Bloom, The Book of Mormon’s imagination of the resurrected Christ’s ministry in the Americas is its “greatest single imaginative breakthrough . . . . The largest heresy among all those that constitute the American Religion is this most implicit and profound of all heresies: the American walks alone with Jesus in a perpetually expanded interval founded upon the forty days’ sojourn of the risen Son of Man.” Bloom, American Religion, 40.
7. See this estimate on the LDS Church’s official website: https://www.lds.org/ensign/1999/ 07/a-look-at-the-church-18051844?lang=eng.
8. In August 2018, current president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Russell M. Nelson, discouraged the use of “Mormon Church” and “Mormonism,” but the terms have long obtained in scholarly discussions of the historical phenomenon with no disparaging implication, see https://www.lds.org/church/news/mormon-is-out-churchreleases-statement-on-how-to-refer-to-the-organization?lang=eng.
9. On the relationship of The Book of Mormon to the vindication of Smith’s prophethood and the religion he founded, see Givens, By the Hand of Mormon, 62–88; and, before him, Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 20–39.
10. For the most sustained application of the “pious fraud” theory, see Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2004), xvii–xviii; for a postsecularist critique of that theory, see Taves, “History and the Claims of Revelation,” 184–187.
11. Empirically speaking, there are many self-identified Mormons who don’t believe The Book of Mormon is a straightforward translation of an ancient text. However, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues to draw certain bright lines that suggest the coupling of Mormon bona fides with belief in the historicity of The Book of Mormon. Hence, Mormon commentators like Blake Ostler and Brant Gardner, even as they acknowledge on the basis of close study of the text and Smith’s other “translation” projects, such as The Book of Abraham, that The Book of Mormon text includes a healthy dose of Smith’s nineteenth-century thought and expression, still insist on some core antiquity vested in the indisputable artifactual reality of the golden plates. Blake Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20.1 (Spring 1987): 66–123;
Brant Gardner, The Gift and Power: Translating the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2011). Revealing here is the resistance raised when some self-identified Mormons openly proposed that spiritual commitment could be maintained even if The Book of Mormon were “inspired fiction.” See Brent Lee Metcalfe, ed., New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1993); and the response in Daniel C. Peterson, ed., Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 6.1 (1994), https://publications.mi.byu.edu/periodical/review-volume-6-issue-number-1/
12. Work like that of Taves, “History and the Claims of Revelation,” importantly models how a non-Mormon and self-identified “secular” scholarly assumption that there were no golden plates and The Book of Mormon is fully a nineteenth-century text need not entail imputations of delusion or fraud to Smith and in fact might involve substantial valorization of the text’s aesthetic and theological achievement. Taves’s trail was blazed somewhat by the Methodist historian Jan Shipps and the Jewish literary critic Harold Bloom. See Shipps, Mormonism, 38–39; Bloom, American Religion, 79–128.
13. Alexander Campbell, Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1832), 13.
14. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 69.
15. The Book of Mormon might be fruitfully read in relation to Americanist discussions of the need to generate “a usable past,” or, as hemispheric Americanist critic Lois Parkinson has updated the term—an “anxiety of origins” as opposed to Bloom’s famous “anxiety of influence.” Lois Parkinson, The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The working out of an anxiety of origins led to the indigenous inhabitants of the North American continent, and there is a rich literature on US settler-colonial nationalism’s attempt to indigenize itself even as it displaced and decimated indigenous nations. Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England); Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Cheryl Walker, Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), to enumerate but a few. On the pertinence of The Book of Mormon to the development of US literary nationalism, see any number of the quotations in note 1.
16. What might be called the transcription theory—that Joseph Smith somehow saw and dictated the English translation of the plate text—is based on some early accounts by assistants and spectators of Smith’s translation process that have then been strongly seconded by Royal Skousen’s interpretations of the manuscript history. For a recent, emphatic statement of this view by a disciple of Skousen’s, see Stanford Carmack, “Joseph Smith Read the Words,” Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 18 (2016): 41–64. A recent example of vaguely considering The Book of Mormon as a compendium of nineteenth-century Americana: “[The Book of Mormon] is . . . an American work of the early nineteenth century. It has a distinctly American character. It is a story about people who crossed an ocean and settled in a wilderness. It is a story of bringing the Gospel to the Americas. It is a story that people of the Jacksonian era could easily relate to and understand because it is part of a very American tradition. Moreover, it radiates revivalist passion, frontier culture and folklore, popular concepts about Indians, and the democratic impulses and political movements of its time.” Robert V. Remini, Joseph Smith (New York: Penguin, 2002), 72. Vogel, in Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet, offers a more granular version of the same, attempting to trace every element of The Book of Mormon to a local or national event that Joseph Smith personally got wind of, suggesting that the production of the text operated by a kind of allegorical automatism.
17. Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), xiii.
18. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108.1 (Fall 2009): 1–21.
19. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 11.
20. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 15.
21. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 13–14.
22. Most salient here are Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Spencer, An Other Testament: On Typology, 2nd ed. (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious
Scholarship, 2016). In the preface to the second edition of his work, Spencer seems to distinguish himself from Hardy by suggesting that, rather than “bracket” the historicity question— Hardy’s term—he “presuppose[s] the Book of Mormon’s historicity but . . . do[es] not much care about it.” In either case, the historicity question is ostensibly deprioritized in the face of a call to, first and foremost, read the text more closely. See also Scales, “New ‘Mormon Moment,’ ” 740–741.
23. Both Hardy and Spencer make this move, albeit in different ways. Hardy simply observes The Book of Mormon’s “importance . . . in the lives of more than thirteen million Latter-day Saints around the world” and reasons that insofar as the text “may someday take a place not only with the Bible but also with the Daodejing, the Dead Sea Scrolls . . . as one of the world’s foremost religious texts . . . a close analysis of Mormon scripture may also offer broad insights into the nature of scriptural production and human religious yearnings” (Understanding the Book of Mormon, xii). The Book of Mormon thus becomes a staple of a kind of old-school religious studies literacy. Spencer professes not to “care” about The Book of Mormon’s historicity, but, in a kind of overcompensation, absolutely insists on the text’s scripturality, which for him seems to be bound up with its capacity to generate what he is most interested in: a theological richness that he hopes will appeal beyond the “already-believing.”
24. Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon, xvi.
25. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 9.
26. See the essays collected in “Dossier: Surface Reading,” Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group 28.2 (Spring 2015); Timothy Bewes, “Reading with the Grain,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21.3 (Sep. 2010): 1–33; Tom Eyers, Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2017); Carolyn Lesjak, “Reading Dialectically,” Criticism 55.2 (Spring 2013): 233–277; Julie Orlemanski, “Scales of Reading,” Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory 26.2–3 (Summer/Fall 2014): 215–233; Ellen Rooney, “Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21.3 (Sep. 2010): 112–139.
27. Take Lesjak’s useful redefinition of “surface reading” as a critique of the rigidification of symptomatic reading: “The very fact that . . . protocols [of Marxist criticism and symptomatic reading, more generally, can so readily be catalogued] registers their failure to be properly dialectical, as well as their attachment to old lessons already learned. They succumb to a success regarding method, whose failure surface reading aims to correct” (“Reading Dialectically,” 250).
28. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 2004); see also Orlemanski, “Scales of Reading,” 225–228, on the pertinence of the “hermeneutic” for pushing back against “surface reading.”
29. Jesse Rosenthal, “Maintenance Work: On Tradition and Development,” b2o (Oct. 6, 2016), http:// www.boundary2.org/ 2016/ 10/ jesse- rosenthal- maintenance- work- on- traditionand-development/
30. Elizabeth Fenton, “Understanding the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 25 (2016): 47–50; for an interesting account of opportunistic uses of poststructuralist theory by some LDS scholars, see John-Charles Duffy, “Can Deconstruction Save the Day: ‘Faithful Scholarship’ and the Uses of Postmodernism,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 41.1 (Spring 2008): 1–33.
31. Spencer, An Other Testament; Earl M. Wunderli, An Imperfect Book: What the Book of Mormon Tells Us About Itself (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2013).
32. Brent Lee Metcalfe, “The Priority of Mosiah: A Prelude to Book of Mormon Exegesis: Explorations in Critical Methodology,” in New Approaches to the Book of Mormon, Brent Lee Metcalfe, ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1994), 395–444.
33. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” and “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’,” in Selected Writings, 4 vols., Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), 4: 389–411; Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks, eds., Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2018), Jared Hickman,“600 bce–1830 ce : The Book of Mormon and the Lived Eschatology of Settler Colonialism” in Timelines of American Literature,
Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager, eds. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 67–84; Hickman, “Amerindian Apocalypse”; Jared Hickman, “The Perverse Core of Mormonism: The Book of Mormon, Genetic Secularity, and Messianic Decoloniality,” in “To Be Learned is Good”: Faith and Scholarship Among the Latter-day Saints, J. Spencer Fluhman, Kathleen Flake, and Jed Woodworth, eds. (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2018), 131–145; Adam S. Miller, “Messianic History: Walter Benjamin and the Book of Mormon,” in Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2012), 21–35.
34. Nineteenth-century Americanist literary studies await further overhaul from the standpoint of indigenous critical theory. See Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
