Religion et langage dans l'Amérique du XIXe siècle. Le cas étrange de Andrews Norton

Abstract

Religion and language in Nineteenth-Century America : The curious case of Andrews Norton From the 1810s to the 1840s the American biblical scholar Andrews Norton attacked German theological radicalism and its American analogues (especially Transcendentalism). A fresh look at these polemics reveals, at their center, epistemological anxieties about the nature and function of language. Norton's writings, though of minor importance in themselves, may serve as a key to unlock a distinctive but largely forgotten American tradition of linguistic speculation, possibly helping to explain thinkers as consequential as the anthropologist L. H. Morgan and the philosopher Charles Peirce.