Prelude

Mark Twain’s 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court offers a fascinating beginning to the study of musical adaptations of Arthurian legend. Similar and yet vastly different to the other sources considered in this book, Mark Twain harnesses the story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table for a nineteenth-century American reader. Unlike ...

DEMOCRATIC REPRESENTATION AND RECONFIGURATION: A MATERIALIST READING OF WALT WHITMAN’S 1855 LEAVES OF GRASS

<p>The following article discusses the material conditions of production surrounding Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass. As a self-published poetry collection, I argue that Whitman uses paratextual features to mirror the text’s thematic rubric. By employing a materialist framework, this article claims that Whitman’s interpretation of America’s retroactive relationship to its democratic founding drives his collection. In depicting the nation as a work in progress, Whitman forces the American reader to revisit, reform and evolve the limited state of democratic power evidenced in his present-day nation. As self-reflexive focalization of the national condition, Leaves of Grass, through its unpretentious material composition, reconstructs the image of the poet as the necessary mediator of America’s unique political conception. Drawing upon Derrida’s synchronic assessment of the Declaration of Independence’s constative and performative structure, as well as Raymond Williams’ championing of the significance of a text’s cultural material context, this article claims that Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a political project that provides intervention for the democratic failures of America’s founding principles.</p>

An Inter-American Episode

This chapter focuses on a paradigmatic misencounter between an American experiencer and a Latin American reader. Examining an implicit debate about the sources of Walt Whitman’s poetry and vision of the Americas, I argue that Waldo Frank, one of the twentieth century’s main literary ambassadors from the US to Latin America, positioned Whitman as the representative US writer whose antibookish experiential aesthetics could serve as a model for “American” writers both in the North and in the South. I show how Frank’s framework provided a foil for Borges’s idiosyncratic view that Whitman’s poetry about America derived entirely from his readings of European and US writers. Although much of the best scholarship on Whitman’s reception in Latin America has concentrated on poets like José Martí and Pablo Neruda, who adapted Whitman’s naturalism, I contend that Borges’s iconoclastic portrait of Whitman as a reader profoundly influenced a range of anti-experiential literary theories and practices in Latin America.

Letter to an American Correspondent

Letter to an American reader who had asked Winnicott for help.