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Kenneth M. Price |
Spring 2005 |
Description:
In this course we will consider selected Whitman texts in relation to broader cultural issues. Whitman's life was shaped by his long engagement with books, magazines, and newspapers--that is, with key features of print culture. Our own cultural moment is shaped by the explosion of new technology that is changing the face of education, editing, libraries, and classrooms. Thinking about Whitman in terms of both print and bytes can offer new perspectives on the tools of knowledge that characterized his world and shape our own.
Whitman has also become a cultural icon. He figures in collective memory in remarkable and varied and competing ways. Whitman's afterlife can be traced in architecture, classical and popular music, the visual arts, advertising, and film. His continuing life is also seen in Walt Whitman schools, bridges, murals, and museums. For the sake of focus, we will study the continuing reinvention of Whitman primarily in literary genres, though we will also touch on film and the fine arts.
Reading assignments are listed below. Despite
the specificity of this schedule, I want this course to retain flexibility so
as to be responsive to your evolving interests, to my own enthusiasms, and to
new scholarship that emerges even during the course itself. I would like
the class to be a vital process (as seems fitting because process itself is a
central concern in the study of this poet). We will study how, for
Whitman, to create was to write, revise, and refine as he created a poetry that
was more evolutionary than static.
Requirements:
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Annotated bibliography, participation and presentations |
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40% |
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20-page paper or group project |
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60% |
Texts:
Whitman, Leaves of Grass
(Penguin)
Whitman, Poetry and Prose (Library of America)
Perlman, Folsom, and Campion,
ed. Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow!)
Schedule:
1/11 Introduction
1/18 "Song of Myself" (1855); discuss the online biography "Walt Whitman" through the section
"The Beginning of the Civil War"
1/25 continue discussion of "Song of
Myself"; Emerson's 1855 letter to Whitman;
Whitman's open letter to Emerson of 1856, in Poetry and Prose,
1350-1361;
finish online biography "Walt Whitman"
2/1 "The Sleepers," "I Sing
the Body Electric," "To Think of Time" in Leaves of Grass,
(1855); Folsom, "Walt
Whitman's 'The Sleepers'"; Beach essay
2/8"Live
Oak,with Moss"; Alan Helms, "Whitman's
'Live Oak with Moss'";
Hershel Parker, "The Real 'Live Oak, with Moss': Straight Talk about Whitman's
'Gay Manifesto'"; "Once I Pass'd
Through a Populous City"
2/15 Civil War; Drum-Taps;
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"
in Poetry and Prose;
Murray, "Traveling
with the Wounded"; Price, "Introduction:
'shall we ever get histories
of
the real things?'"
2/22 Reviews
of Whitman; Essay provided on reviews; Rich, "Beginners"
in Measure.
3/1Specimen Days in Poetry and Prose.
3/8 Annotated bibliography due. Discussion of topics. Discussion of one article by conference attendee.
3/15 Spring break
3/22 Research
3/29Images of Whitman: discussion will
focus on the marriage photos; "Dalliance
of the Eagles"; Whitman and the Ben Shahn mural;
Whitman and Plymouth Rock
** Whitman Conference, March 31 – April 2 **
4/5 Responses to individual conference paper (500 words) to share with class; Whitman's impact:
Measure of His Song, 21–74; Hughes essays and poems.
4/12 June Jordan, Ginsberg, Lawrence; Ostriker (all in Measure)
4/19 In class presentation of another student's work; class discussion and critique
4/26 "Whitman at the Movies"; Love and Death on Long Island. Paper due.
Links to OnlineResources:
2. The Classroom Electric: Dickinson, Whitman, and American Culture
Other Electronic
Resources:
1. Major Authors on CD-ROM: Walt Whitman, ed. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price (Primary Source Media, 1997).
The CD includes thousands of scanned images of Whitman
manuscripts and notebooks from the Library of Congress and the New York Public
Library. Moreover, we include, in freshly keyed form, the twenty-two
volumes of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman (New York University
Press), making available to students and scholars an electronically searchable
edition of the full range of Whitman's writings. The CD also includes
both e-text and scanned facsimiles of the pages of all six editions of Leaves
of Grass, nearly all the contemporary reviews of Whitman's work, and all
known photographs of Whitman (over 130).
2. Microfilm of the Feinberg-Whitman Collection at the Library of Congress
The Feinberg Collection is the world's single
greatest collection of Whitman manuscripts, books, and related materials.
There are over 300,000 items in the Feinberg collection. Roughly half of
the collection (which has thankfully been indexed!) is available on microfilm.
Love library recently purchased the microfilm collection.
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