Material culture exhibits are due next week!!!
One of the themes raised during our walking tour was the layering of the present upon the past. This raises the question of what exactly is the purpose of what we are doing in this class, what, if anything, is to be learned by looking back at the past and drawing connections to our contemporary lived experience. It is important that we not fall into cliched ideas about progress, like that we are more enlightened today than people were in the past.
What is Whitman trying to accomplish through his journalistic writings collected in the volume Walt Whitman’s New York? What is the difference between Whitman the poet and Whitman the journalist? This is an important distinction for us to wrestle with, because we are the only class in the Whitman project really reading deeply in Whitman’s journalism, and so this is something we can bring to the rest of the classes.
Whitman demonstrates in his poetry “an elastic sense of self.” In his journalism, Whitman speaks to his audience as a group of people, he is writing about NYC from inside NYC, there is a civic-mindedness, he is really wrestling with the notion of what it means to be a citizen.
In Walt Whitman’s New York on page 57, there is an apparent convergence between Whitman the poet and Whitman the journalist. He is using the “imperial we” and basically trying to sell Brooklyn on the basis of its middle class, its democratic spirit. There are also biographical snippets tucked into Whitman’s journalistic prose. For example, on page 78, Whitman makes reference to his Sunday school, even naming it by street.
For next week, in addition to your Material Culture exhibit, read the introduction to Franklin Evans.
Whitman’s journalistic “I” vs. Whitman’s poetic I
Journalistic eye — more of a we/us that is civic-minded, that has an activist, historic interest in local place, people, and politics
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