Before "The Raven": The Story of a Forgotten American Type

NATIVE CULTURES OF THE AMERICAS

SPEAKER: SARAH RIVETT, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

RESPONDENT: MATTHEW SPELLBERG

Sarah Rivett is Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (2011) and Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (2017). She is currently writing a book on ravens in American literary history.

In 1728 Jonathan Edwards remarked that ravens (birds of the genus corvus) are “types of devils.” Expanding a long history of biblical commentaries and Christian typology Edwards took the raven’s disobedience in Genesis 8.7 in a hyperbolic direction. This set the literary stage for Poe to declare the raven a “thing of evil.” But scholars of American typology and literature have little to say about Edwards’s raven. Not even Perry Miller mentioned Edwards’s raven, or imagined a connection to Poe’s poem, despite having written a book called The Raven and the Whale (1956). “Before the Raven: The Story of a Forgotten American Type” compares the raven in The Book of Genesis to Indigenous Raven stories. In stories from the Pacific Northwest Coast and Interior of Alaska as well as from the Bering Sea and Siberia, the raven is a well-known trickster and cultural hero, a figure that can be driven by lust but that also enacts a kind of lawless justice. These stories beckon new consideration of the raven in The Book of Genesis, as well as in Edwards’s theological writings and subsequent historiography. By ignoring the complexity of the raven as type, scholars of American typology forged an origins story that stands in contradistinction to what the raven symbolizes: godless authority and a contra-teleological presence. The raven flies “to and fro” in Genesis. His story endures in the Bible as it does for the Haida, Tlingit, and Salish, and in each of these traditions it is perpetually in medias res. With no beginning or end to its narrative, the raven repudiates the possibility of national origins in anything but an artificial sense. American Literature abides in raven’s land.

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After registering, you should receive the confirmation link  and the password to your e-mail. Please use the same password to access Sarah Rivett's paper attached. If you have any questions or difficulty, please contact Matthew Spellberg at mspellberg@fas.harvard.edu