糖心TV

Whitman鈥檚 Touch: Toward a Haptic Reading of Whitman鈥檚 Leaves

C茅cile Roudeau (Universit茅 de Paris)

Whitman鈥檚 poetry makes sense through, and makes sense to, the reader鈥檚 senses; his poems ask us to touch and be touched, to hold him, man and body, in hand. This paper will turn to Whitman鈥檚 other leaves, the manuscripts that have been digitized and are now available through a (mental) haptic gesture in the section 鈥淚n Whitman鈥檚 Hand鈥� of the Walt Whitman Archives website. Whitman, like Dickinson and others at the time, wrote his poems on scraps of papers, on the flap of envelopes, on the back of newspaper articles written by himself or others. Reading Whitman on both sides / reading both sides of Whitman allows us to reassemble what has been made distinct through the combined agency of printer, editor and poet: prose and poetry; political pamphlets and love jottings; Whitman the eccentric hobo and Whitman the clerk in Washington. Recovering this material if contingent contiguity confronts us with a messier trove than the neat arrangements of both the death-bed edition of his poems or the volume of Collected Prose have so far suggested. Allowing those different leaves to touch challenges our own critical and analytical practices and the legibility of his oeuvre, helping us to revisit a commonplace liaison in Whitman鈥檚 oeuvre, that of poetics and politics. More specifically in this paper, I propose that reading Whitman with both hands complicates the poet鈥檚 democratic thrust even as it recovers a little-known genealogy of an American experiment with regulatory governance.

C茅cile Roudeau is professor of American literature at Universit茅 de Paris. Her first book (Universit茅 Paris Sorbonne, 2012) revisits the notion of 鈥減lace鈥� in New England regionalist writing, and argues that 鈥渢aking place鈥� was as much a political and epistemic claim as a spatial experience. She is currently working on a book project titled 鈥淏eyond Stateless Literature: Practices of Democratic Power in Nineteenth-Century US Letters.鈥� This book follows her essay, written in French, on the 鈥淔ictions of the Commons in Nineteenth-century US Literature.鈥� C茅cile is also the current editor of Transatlantica, the on-line peer-reviewed journal of the French Association of American Studies.