Text/Context part 2: Pedagogical Uses

Whitman Project version 3 (15.10.09)

[An assignment prompt based on this lesson plan, along with versions 1 (08.10.09) and 2 (13.10.09) attached]


We've established that the writing/creation of a text, such as Walt Whitman's poem, Leaves of Grass, can be dynamic, not static--and even continuously dynamic with our, his audience's, own "remixing" of it. But what about our reading/interpretation? Can our reading of the work be just as dynamic--i.e. changing depending on certain contexts? Although there are many variables that can affect our reading (i.e. more internal ones such as your age, race, sex/gender, literacy/literary training, even your mood at the time, and so on) we are here focusing on the space(s) where you may find this text. The most basic example may be hermeneutic differences between reading said poem in a printed book compared to online on a website, and even then there are many variables from book to book, site to site.


Day 1 Readings and Discussion
Before jumping into Whitman's poem, let's get acquainted with the analytical approach and process you'll be using. Text and textuality have been experiencing "the visual turn" in which the ways we have conventionally defined them are more and more blurring with imagery--that is, the way we use media today necessitates a spectrum from the written text using the letters of the alphabet at one end of the spectrum, to the visual images and objects at the other end, to everything in between, such as the spaces the texts are placed in, using different font typefaces for different effects, the way they are manipulated, etc. First, read Purdue OWL's primer on visual rhetoric--it has four pages that you can navigate at the bottom of the page. Then read through Stanford's four examples of reading images--again, navigation on the bottom.

N.B. These readings may be deceivingly elementary, but they will greatly help you with the upcoming assignment. We will discuss these readings in class.


Day 2 Assignment and Discussion
Choose a cultural "text" that you like or are interested in, other than Whitman's Leaves of Grass--perhaps another poem, a photograph or painting, a film's scene, etc. Then think about two or more different spaces where you have seen or can find this text. E.g. How is the Mona Lisa painting (a text) different when we view: the original painting first-hand in The Louvre vs. as a digital image attached to its Wikipedia entry and all that informative text around it vs. as a print pattern on a mass-produced Andy Warhol pop art postcard? You are welcome to use this example or your own chosen text. Be creative in thinking about where you might find your chosen text--nothing is off-limits! Write an informal, bulleted-points list response about how the way you read your chosen text inscribes different meanings and values depending on where you find it and how it is presented.


Day 3 Assignment and Discussion
When you feel that you have a better understanding of how different contexts can affect the way we read/interpret a text or work, write a similar analytical response in a more formal blog-essay with Whitman's Leaves of Grass, again using two or more different spaces where you have seen or can find the poem. The reason I continue to leave this open is so that you have freedom in exploring where the text may appear. However, in case you are hard pressed to find some, here are some suggestions to start you off (feel free to go out and find other, unique, unusual places where you come across this text):

• The original manuscript of the poem;
• Any college "textbook" copy of the poem;
  
• In bits and pieces, as part of the U.S. Government's Library of Congress' archives;
• A digital copy with pop-up annotations, as part of an academic web text study;
• In a photograph, being read by Marilyn Monroe;
• An audio recording (reading) of the poem by Whitman himself;
• any others.
  

Further things to think about in your responses: Who has placed the text in that space? And for what purpose--personal, professional, academic, leisure, other? How do you know--i.e. what are the characteristics of the context that make you think so? What meanings and values does the space allow or deny the text?

The big questions to tackle at the end: How does your reading/interpretation shift around depending on where you find a text? What might your analyses say about texts and cultural contexts in general?

Text/Context part 1: As Cultural Object

When reading a certain work through a New Historicist lens, not only am I interested in the cultural objects mentioned directly or invoked through certain actions, but even more so I am interested in how the actual text itself works as a cultural object. For instance, in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, there are various references to writing, printing/publishing, and books:

Writing and talk do not prove me,
I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,
With the hush of my lips I confound the topmost skeptic.

[...]

To walk up my stoop is unaccountable . . . . I pause to consider if it really be,
That I eat and drink is spectacle enough for the great authors and schools,
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

[...]

My words are words of a questioning, and to indicate reality;
This printed and bound book . . . . but the printer and the printing-office boy?

But, while these lines inspire me to think about these literacy objects as cultural ones that may inform meaning in/of this work, I find it much more challenging to think about how the poem's written form, in its various contexts, functions culturally--i.e. how it functions in its original form, vs. a facsimile, vs. print in a hard copy today, vs. electronic print as part of an archive, etc.

Archives, Whitman, and the Transatlantic Remix

Although archives readily present scholars and students with much information, navigating them can be somewhat of a challenge. It’s relatively easy to move through one like Project Gutenberg, because it’s a bare-bones collection of texts. But what about one more rich in features? To test the “scholasticity” of one such archive, I am here looking at the Walt Whitman Archive, specifically concerned with an example class lesson that teaches his Leaves of Grass (1855) in terms of the questions: “Does Whitman negotiate the individual’s space/place/role in the collective? How? Why?,” and in what ways we can remix the poem in order to defamiliarise it and read it with a fresh perspective.

One way for scholars and students to navigate an archive such as this is through the mysterious ways of online tools such as TokenX—no, not the latest derogatory term the GOP has for Obama, but an online tool that has been customised for this particular archive. My colleagues (blogroll bar to the side>>) have already done such a bang-up job of tinkering with it through every nook and cranny. So, at the risk of being repetitive, I am instead looking at the poem through other means: by defamiliarising it through foreignness.

I am here looking at a "transatlantic remix" of the poem, not one I've done myself, but the British edition that is already catalogued in the archive. Whitman's 1855 original begins with the lines: "I CELEBRATE myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." The "I" is clearly an "American 'I'" for an American audience because, even though it is singular first-person speaking to a singular second-person "you," it offers an invitation to assume something together. The speaker begins by establishing that the the idea of the individual American is confluent with the idea of American society.

On the other hand, the first edition printed in 1868 Britain, our "transatlantic remix," begins with a stanza/short poem that wasn't even in Whitman's 1855 original: "I HEARD that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World, / And to define America, her athletic Democracy, / Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted," and didn't appear in any American edition until 3 years later in the American 1871 edition. That Whitman was growing in notoriety in the international scene, even so far as to gain a loyal fanbase across the pond, may have made Whitman and/or the British edition's editors choose this stanza to open with. Although, however diplomatic or friendly the gesture, the Othering of the non-American reader creates a sociolinguistic chasm, within which very little confluence of the individual and society takes place.

Bleep

It's Banned Books Week, which I find hard to swallow, not just for the appalling literary censorship that is still happening in this day and age, but also because I would have thought technology would have circumvented many of the issues by now. As the Iranian elections proved, the dissemination of information is now readily done over the internet. Why isn't this happening with book$, novel$, creative work$? Oh...