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The Puritan and the Gambler

College of Liberal Arts

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BIES presents

 

 The Puritan and the Gambler          

         Gerard Passannante                      

          (University of Maryland)

         Wednesday, November 13

            3 p.m. in HRC 3.206   

 

This presentation travels from Max Weber's influential proposals about capitalism in the early twentieth century back to practices of spiritual autobiography in the seventeenth, making a case for the significance of an unlikely analogy between the Puritan and the gambler across both historical contexts. With particular attention to the addictive allure of anxiety in early modern Puritan writing, I argue that the experience of compulsion, with its tendency to reduce the self to a simple sequence of thoughts or actions, has the capacity to join otherwise dissimilar activities such as obsessive work, worry, self-interrogation, and the taking of risks. Whereas Weber focuses on the force of ideas in history, my interest is the way compulsion facilitates movement between different domains of experience and enables recognition across space and time.