350:647                                                                                                

Index # - 52882

Distribution Requirement:  A4, C, D

Monday – 1:10 p.m. 

CCA – 8 Bishop Place

Michael Warner 

Seminar:  Whitman

This course will be an intensive reading in Whitman, with a number of special thematic units on some context of Whitman’s writing.  Students will be introduced to the tradition and current preoccupations of Whitman criticism.  This will include some interesting new discoveries that have arisen in connection with the electronic edition of Whitman hosted at Virginia; one of our topics will be the implications of such an online project for textual studies and criticism.

Unlike most people who set themselves up as authors, Whitman did not write a succession of books; he rewrote the same book from the beginning of his poetic career to its end.  Nine substantially different editions (more or less, depending on your criteria) appeared between 1855 and 1892.  In the early editions no author was identified on the title page.  So we will need to ask why these texts–if “texts” is even the right word–seem so anomalous.  Was the 1855 edition meant to be read as an instance of the special kind of discourse known as poetry?  Contemporaries had considerable difficulty recognizing it as such, and to read it as poetry one must develop at minimum a new conception of poetry’s function and character.  Our discussion of Whitman will therefore proceed on two levels: close reading of the texts, their anomalies and revisions; and their framing as a certain kind of discourse, emanating from a peculiar kind of author, organizing a peculiar relation of address with the reader.  (This is what I have referred to as his metadiscursive perversity.)  In this connection we will consider Whitman’s relation to the print public sphere, as illustrated variously in his early journalism, his temperance novel Franklin Evans, the political treatises “The Eighteenth Presidency!” and Democratic Vistas.  Whitman’s writing also often approximates oratory and music, especially opera, and these, too, will be treated in context.

We will also pay close attention to the emerging distinction between religion and the secular, as that distinction was framed in nineteenth-century America, in order to understand the quasi-religious ambitions under which Whitman’s writing labors, its frequently observed prophetic or scriptural cast, even when its own rhetoric is so markedly indebted to the Enlightenment anticlericalism of Thomas Paine, Frances Wright, and Constantine Volney.  The question of religion will lead us to the nature of Whitman’s worldliness, the relation between his radical modernity and eschatology, and the remarkable cult that developed around the later Whitman, who was revered as a kind of saint by such figures as John Burroughs, Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds, and Richard Maurice Bucke (author of Cosmic Consciousness, from which we will read a selection).  Whitman was not alone in trying to dissolve the antinomy between religion and radical secularism, and we will compare his efforts with those of his great influence, Emerson.  Readings will include Emerson’s Divinity School Address and “The Poet.”

We will make no attempt in this course to transcend sexuality in Whitman’s work.  Indeed, Whitman may be said to be the first figure to articulate a vision of sexuality as an expressive capacity of individuals and a distinctive category of the human, rooted in the refractory character of embodied experience. We will inquire into the rhetoric and background conditions that made this possible, without assimilating Whitman to the modern conception of gay or homosexual identity.  This will involve an extensive examination of the Calamus lyrics and their relation to the more familiar longer poems.

Other topics to be discussed along the way include Whitman’s marked working-class identity, retained throughout his life; New York City literary culture and its emergent bohemian scene as a context of literary practice; nationalism, race, the state, and ambiguities of antislavery politics; stranger sociability, intimacy, and the pragmatics of  “self” in Whitman.

We will devote a special unit to violence and redemption in the Civil War context, reading not only Drum-Taps in its separate, stand-alone form, but other poetry and writing of the Civil War as a base of comparison.

The class will also make at least one field trip, possibly two:  likely destinations are the Whitman house in Camden and the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.