Timothy Robbins | Kirkwood Community College (original) (raw)
Papers by Timothy Robbins
Rebus Community Reports: Insights from OER Project Leads, 2019
Donna Langille discusses her research on the processes behind Robbins and his students' building ... more Donna Langille discusses her research on the processes behind Robbins and his students' building of the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature in “The Collective Work of Collected Works” in Langille, Donna. Rebus Community Reports: Insights from OER Project Leads, Rebus Foundation, 27 Sept. 2019.
The New Whitman Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions. , 2019
A study of the reception and uses of Whitman's "Song of Myself" across the late 19th - early 20th... more A study of the reception and uses of Whitman's "Song of Myself" across the late 19th - early 20th century social sciences.
Situates the composition of Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas—from manuscript notes, source materi... more Situates the composition of Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas—from manuscript notes, source material, and pilot essays to its publication as an 84-page pamphlet—within the intellectual tendencies of the Reconstruction-era American social science movement to reveal Whitman's text as an important case study in the nascent discipline. In his program to cultivate a population of self-reliant, creative readers, Whitman examines the national histories of literary institutions; he meditates on the social reproduction of “taste” and its connections to political and economic power; and he conceives of a democratic reception theory based on a new ethics of reading, entering debates about the “best books” with the country’s newly professionalized class of librarians. This essay argues that in linking the transmission, reception, and circulation of “culture” to the nation’s social evolution, Whitman laid the groundwork for that concept’s adoption by future sociologists, anthropologists, and activists at the turn of the twentieth century.
Robbins, Timothy. "John Marsh. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From... more Robbins, Timothy. "John Marsh. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself [review]." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 33 (2015), 63-67
Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 57.1. pp. 80-105., Mar 2015
This essay situates Emma Goldman in a radical Whitman tradition -- part of the poet's leftist "re... more This essay situates Emma Goldman in a radical Whitman tradition -- part of the poet's leftist "reception history." By examining Goldman’s aesthetic and political work alongside her unpublished and neglected manuscript lectures; I demonstrate the centrality of Whitman’s verse and life to the sustenance of her “beautiful ideal” of anarchism.
Conference Presentations by Timothy Robbins
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, as Daniel Brinton became an internationally recog... more In the final decades of the nineteenth century, as Daniel Brinton became an internationally recognized " Americanist " —an ethnological researcher of Native American cultures—he crossed the Delaware River often from the University of Pennsylvania to call on the elderly Walt Whitman. Whitman, for his part, was captivated by Brinton's ethnology, a scientific system that pledged to encompass and organize a panorama of American types just as he had cataloged in Leaves of Grass. Whether alone in his Philadelphia library charting verb conjugations or debating democracy in Whitman's cramped Camden parlor, Brinton, too was fashioning the story of an " American " race. This paper graphs the intellectual partnership and corresponding careers of Brinton and Whitman against the discursive development of anthropology in the United States. Over the course of their friendship, Brinton delivered numerous public lectures and published myriad articles and books on Native American folklores, languages, and religious practices as well as the methods of ethnology at large. He also served as president of the Walt Whitman Fellowship, and published articles linking Leaves of Grass to anthropological concepts in venues as various as the flagship American Anthropologist and the Whitman fanzine, the Conservator. Despite the overlap between his leading roles in both anthropology and the Whitman societies, literary scholars have made only casual reference to Brinton. Filtering Brinton and Whitman's alliance back into their respective works brings back to life the adjoining projects of these nineteenth-century " Americanists, " who collected images, stories and languages in an effort to restore and expand their distinctive conceptions of national identity.
As a young black radical active in Muncie, Indiana, Ross D. Brown (b. 1881) self-published severa... more As a young black radical active in Muncie, Indiana, Ross D. Brown (b. 1881) self-published several volumes of sonnets, ballads, and verse musings that recounted trade union struggles, offered treatises on socialism, and poetically tested the early twentieth century’s insuperable “color line.” A rising star in the Socialist Party of America, he won the support of Eugene V. Debs, whose “Introductory” graced the inset of each collection and announced Brown to the world as a “gifted young colored revolutionist” and a “propagandist of rare versatility” in whom “the colored people have [found] a champion worthy of their cause, and the same is true of the working class” (http://debs.indstate.edu/b880l3_1916.pdf).
As any good socialist of his day, Brown refused to distinguish poetry from his work as an orator, a fact reflected not only in theme and form but in the composition and dissemination of his poetry pamphlets, which acted as exigent party propaganda. My paper aims to revive, through Brown's propaganda poetry, this peculiarly wonderful moment when socialists embraced poetic imagination as an integral part of fomenting social change. While Brown’s “conventional” poetry aimed to combine readerly pleasure with a usable political message, he toed cautiously along the fragile class/race boundaries of the fractured, Progressive Era left. In poems such as “Socialism and the Negro,” “The Black Scab,” and “Master and Slave,” Brown signaled solidarity with a wide working-class audience by containing colloquial diction and labor struggle parlance within ballad forms. But while his verse made sustained appeals for racial empathy, Brown’s measured rhetoric all the time emphasized strategic power through unity, the need for workers of all races to unite against capitalist exploitation.
“Leaves of Grass and the Sociology of the South” locates Whitman’s presence in the academic discu... more “Leaves of Grass and the Sociology of the South” locates Whitman’s presence in the academic discussions around “modernization” in the Progressive Era/Jim Crow American South —debates frequently housed in the region’s earliest sociology departments. Robbins captures this phenomenon by tracking applications of Whitman’s poetry in the sociological works of two (relatively obscure) pioneers of the discipline: Howard University professor, Kelly Miller (1863-1939) and the celebrated folklorist and leading thinker of the “New South,” Howard W. Odum (1884-1954). From charting Miller’s deep engagement with Whitman, from his “What Walt Whitman Means to the Negro” speech at the first Walt Whitman Fellowship International meeting through his prolific career to Odum’s various deployments of Leaves of Grass in books of social planning (The Way of the South), black folklore (Rainbow Round My Shoulder) and disciplinary history (American Sociology), Robbins’ case studies portray the various ways that Whitman’s presence haunted the multifaceted and contradictory conception of a “modern” South.
In 1930, “Chicago School” sociologist Robert E. Park stood before the Walt Whitman Fellowship and... more In 1930, “Chicago School” sociologist Robert E. Park stood before the Walt Whitman Fellowship and claimed a poem, “Song of Myself,” to be a vital resource for social critique. Park had already joined a well-established tradition in the still-unsettled social sciences, one that looked to Whitman for a language that could gather and organize an array human types, just as the poet had cataloged in his Leaves of Grass. This paper recasts the intellectual history of U.S. sociology as a reception study of the poems of Walt Whitman. I chart the presence of Whitman’s Leaves across an array of Progressive Era periodicals, from flagship academic journals like the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and the American Anthropologist to short-lived little magazines like the Conservator and To-Morrow. Prominent intellectuals like Park and Ruth Benedict, forgotten academics such as Daniel Brinton, Edward A. Ross, and Howard Odum, and settlement house workers like Oscar Triggs and Parker Sercombe all engaged Whitman under the banner of “social science.” They recirculated poetic extracts to illuminate the range of issues—from mass media and crowd psychology to race relations and urban studies—that became the foci of modern sociology. As the fledgling discipline probed for new conceptual models of social development in a modern, secular age, this professionalizing, reform-minded class of social scientists employed nineteenth-century verse to explicate twentieth-century social theory. And more than most, Whitman’s poetry, which demanded empathy as well as observation, furnished the vocabulary for a compassionate, impartial and distinctively American sociology.
This paper tracks the reception history of “Song of Myself” across the career of Robert Ezra Park... more This paper tracks the reception history of “Song of Myself” across the career of Robert Ezra Park, a lifelong Whitman devotee and one of the most influential figures in early U.S. sociology.
Situating Park’s 1930 lecture on the poet to the Chicago Walt Whitman Fellowship within the development of his groundbreaking work on “human ecology,” I show how “Song of Myself” explained to Park the discipline’s fundamental relationship between social institutions and biological inheritance. In Whitman’s desire to “turn and live with animals,” rather than cope with the complications and tacit rules of social interaction, “Song” staged a socialized individual’s longing to escape from human culture into a pre-social past, throwing into relief a foundational principle of Park’s social theory. I contextualize this reception history in relation to the current scholarship in the rhetoric of science, portraying the various ways that Whitman’s presence haunted the conception of sociological research in the United States.
This paper argues for a renewed understanding of sociology’s historical role as a “third culture,... more This paper argues for a renewed understanding of sociology’s historical role as a “third culture,” between science and literature, by examining sociologist Edward A. Ross’ engagement with “Song of Myself” in his seminal work, Social Control (1901).
“Social control,” the idea that culturally-constituted belief systems exert greater control over human behavior than natural ability or legal governance, was a pioneering concept in the field. Emerging in the thick of progressive reform movements, and at the founding moment of sociology in the academy, Ross’s theory proposed that only the expert social investigator could guide society in the direction of rational and just progress, which, I contend, explains his attraction to Whitman.
Social Control demanded a seemingly impossible rhetorical pose for the sociologist, involving both impartial observation and interpersonal mediation. Ross seized on the absorptive “I” of “Song of Myself,” a figure he perceived as pre-ideological; Whitman’s “I” could at once witness and become master or slave, while denying neither.
In August of 1905, To-Morrow magazine (1903-1909)—a Chicago-based journal, subtitled A Monthly Ha... more In August of 1905, To-Morrow magazine (1903-1909)—a Chicago-based journal, subtitled A Monthly Handbook of the Changing Order—announced the creation of an institute for the “society of advanced thought and rational ideals, devoted to human growth and intellectual expansion”: the Walt Whitman-Herbert Spencer Center (10). The Center, lodged in the publishing offices of To-Morrow, lasted only two years; in that time it hosted a number of aspiring middle-class professionals and radical “free-thinkers,” and many veterans of the turn-of-the-century's Arts and Crafts and socialist movements, who participated in weekly lectures and poetry recitations, read in the ever-growing library of materials on science, politics, and literature, and honed their bookbinding and woodworking skills in the establishment’s handicrafts workshop.
The society’s leading literati, Oscar Lovell Triggs and Parker H. Sercombe, articulated the movements’ enigmatic politics—a welding of the republican morals of artisan labor onto a progressive faith in organizational improvement via evolutionary science—through the “mortising” of Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman, a pairing that “symbolize[d] the unity and harmony that may naturally coexist when contemplating the coherent intellectual grandeur of one and the emotional breadth and understanding of the other” (10).
This paper interrogates the motivations, practices, and consequences of the To-Morrow group’s Whitmanian (and to a lesser extent Spencerian) inspirations through an examination of the Center’s institutional culture: including recorded roundtable notes and photographs, reprintings of Whitman's images, poetry, and prose, and selections from remaining lectures.
I seek to demonstrate how the Spencer-Whitman Center, by situating Whitman as the romantic “moment” in a harmonious fusion between literature and science, utilized the poet to negotiate the ideas of social Darwinism and industrial democracy, establishing itself as a paradoxical cultural site of "antimodern modernism."
In “Art and Revolution,” Emma Goldman asserted that all art is revolutionary, for it exists “not... more In “Art and Revolution,” Emma Goldman asserted that all
art is revolutionary, for it exists “not to show [people] what they have been before, but to present them with a new vision of life.” For Goldman, no work of art embodied this spirit like Leaves of Grass : literature’s “greatest expression of man in revolt.”
This essay explores the asymmetrical connection of Whitman’s national, democratic poetics with Goldman’s internationalist, revolutionary anarchism, drawing out the dialectic of praxis, intimacy concretized in direct action, and theory, the imaginary animation of human potential, founded by Goldman in the processes of reading Leaves of Grass.
Goldman not only “uses” Whitman’s life and work rhetorically, to insist on the primacy of the emancipated individual as a pathway to community, but ferrets out an aesthetic insight key to her emergent political theory: that integral to the radical development of the individual is the role of reading. A creative, mediatory practice, reading turns on the interest, agency, and self-development of the subject. If, for Goldman, anarchism’s chief task was to plant the seeds of radical thought, Leaves of Grass provided the textual soil from which to cultivate the masses’ revolutionary potential; proof still that “we need Walt Whitman now more than ever.”
This paper offered a close reading of that scandalous last page of Mike Gold’s Jews without Money... more This paper offered a close reading of that scandalous last page of Mike Gold’s Jews without Money. Mapping the structure of the apostrophe onto the work’s discontinuous narrative, I recasted the narrator's embarrassing/triumphant call to the coming community as the revolutionary gesture’s necessary stay against narrative temporality.
Teaching Documents by Timothy Robbins
Current and updated Fall 2019 syllabus for a Honors research seminar in the Public Humanities.
Current and updated Early American Literature syllabus for Fall 2019.
Updated "Discourse 3" syllabus from the multimodal Discourse sequence at Graceland University
Updated "Discourse 1" syllabus (from the multimodal Discourse sequence at Graceland University.)
Rebus Community Reports: Insights from OER Project Leads, 2019
Donna Langille discusses her research on the processes behind Robbins and his students' building ... more Donna Langille discusses her research on the processes behind Robbins and his students' building of the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature in “The Collective Work of Collected Works” in Langille, Donna. Rebus Community Reports: Insights from OER Project Leads, Rebus Foundation, 27 Sept. 2019.
The New Whitman Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions. , 2019
A study of the reception and uses of Whitman's "Song of Myself" across the late 19th - early 20th... more A study of the reception and uses of Whitman's "Song of Myself" across the late 19th - early 20th century social sciences.
Situates the composition of Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas—from manuscript notes, source materi... more Situates the composition of Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas—from manuscript notes, source material, and pilot essays to its publication as an 84-page pamphlet—within the intellectual tendencies of the Reconstruction-era American social science movement to reveal Whitman's text as an important case study in the nascent discipline. In his program to cultivate a population of self-reliant, creative readers, Whitman examines the national histories of literary institutions; he meditates on the social reproduction of “taste” and its connections to political and economic power; and he conceives of a democratic reception theory based on a new ethics of reading, entering debates about the “best books” with the country’s newly professionalized class of librarians. This essay argues that in linking the transmission, reception, and circulation of “culture” to the nation’s social evolution, Whitman laid the groundwork for that concept’s adoption by future sociologists, anthropologists, and activists at the turn of the twentieth century.
Robbins, Timothy. "John Marsh. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From... more Robbins, Timothy. "John Marsh. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself [review]." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 33 (2015), 63-67
Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 57.1. pp. 80-105., Mar 2015
This essay situates Emma Goldman in a radical Whitman tradition -- part of the poet's leftist "re... more This essay situates Emma Goldman in a radical Whitman tradition -- part of the poet's leftist "reception history." By examining Goldman’s aesthetic and political work alongside her unpublished and neglected manuscript lectures; I demonstrate the centrality of Whitman’s verse and life to the sustenance of her “beautiful ideal” of anarchism.
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, as Daniel Brinton became an internationally recog... more In the final decades of the nineteenth century, as Daniel Brinton became an internationally recognized " Americanist " —an ethnological researcher of Native American cultures—he crossed the Delaware River often from the University of Pennsylvania to call on the elderly Walt Whitman. Whitman, for his part, was captivated by Brinton's ethnology, a scientific system that pledged to encompass and organize a panorama of American types just as he had cataloged in Leaves of Grass. Whether alone in his Philadelphia library charting verb conjugations or debating democracy in Whitman's cramped Camden parlor, Brinton, too was fashioning the story of an " American " race. This paper graphs the intellectual partnership and corresponding careers of Brinton and Whitman against the discursive development of anthropology in the United States. Over the course of their friendship, Brinton delivered numerous public lectures and published myriad articles and books on Native American folklores, languages, and religious practices as well as the methods of ethnology at large. He also served as president of the Walt Whitman Fellowship, and published articles linking Leaves of Grass to anthropological concepts in venues as various as the flagship American Anthropologist and the Whitman fanzine, the Conservator. Despite the overlap between his leading roles in both anthropology and the Whitman societies, literary scholars have made only casual reference to Brinton. Filtering Brinton and Whitman's alliance back into their respective works brings back to life the adjoining projects of these nineteenth-century " Americanists, " who collected images, stories and languages in an effort to restore and expand their distinctive conceptions of national identity.
As a young black radical active in Muncie, Indiana, Ross D. Brown (b. 1881) self-published severa... more As a young black radical active in Muncie, Indiana, Ross D. Brown (b. 1881) self-published several volumes of sonnets, ballads, and verse musings that recounted trade union struggles, offered treatises on socialism, and poetically tested the early twentieth century’s insuperable “color line.” A rising star in the Socialist Party of America, he won the support of Eugene V. Debs, whose “Introductory” graced the inset of each collection and announced Brown to the world as a “gifted young colored revolutionist” and a “propagandist of rare versatility” in whom “the colored people have [found] a champion worthy of their cause, and the same is true of the working class” (http://debs.indstate.edu/b880l3_1916.pdf).
As any good socialist of his day, Brown refused to distinguish poetry from his work as an orator, a fact reflected not only in theme and form but in the composition and dissemination of his poetry pamphlets, which acted as exigent party propaganda. My paper aims to revive, through Brown's propaganda poetry, this peculiarly wonderful moment when socialists embraced poetic imagination as an integral part of fomenting social change. While Brown’s “conventional” poetry aimed to combine readerly pleasure with a usable political message, he toed cautiously along the fragile class/race boundaries of the fractured, Progressive Era left. In poems such as “Socialism and the Negro,” “The Black Scab,” and “Master and Slave,” Brown signaled solidarity with a wide working-class audience by containing colloquial diction and labor struggle parlance within ballad forms. But while his verse made sustained appeals for racial empathy, Brown’s measured rhetoric all the time emphasized strategic power through unity, the need for workers of all races to unite against capitalist exploitation.
“Leaves of Grass and the Sociology of the South” locates Whitman’s presence in the academic discu... more “Leaves of Grass and the Sociology of the South” locates Whitman’s presence in the academic discussions around “modernization” in the Progressive Era/Jim Crow American South —debates frequently housed in the region’s earliest sociology departments. Robbins captures this phenomenon by tracking applications of Whitman’s poetry in the sociological works of two (relatively obscure) pioneers of the discipline: Howard University professor, Kelly Miller (1863-1939) and the celebrated folklorist and leading thinker of the “New South,” Howard W. Odum (1884-1954). From charting Miller’s deep engagement with Whitman, from his “What Walt Whitman Means to the Negro” speech at the first Walt Whitman Fellowship International meeting through his prolific career to Odum’s various deployments of Leaves of Grass in books of social planning (The Way of the South), black folklore (Rainbow Round My Shoulder) and disciplinary history (American Sociology), Robbins’ case studies portray the various ways that Whitman’s presence haunted the multifaceted and contradictory conception of a “modern” South.
In 1930, “Chicago School” sociologist Robert E. Park stood before the Walt Whitman Fellowship and... more In 1930, “Chicago School” sociologist Robert E. Park stood before the Walt Whitman Fellowship and claimed a poem, “Song of Myself,” to be a vital resource for social critique. Park had already joined a well-established tradition in the still-unsettled social sciences, one that looked to Whitman for a language that could gather and organize an array human types, just as the poet had cataloged in his Leaves of Grass. This paper recasts the intellectual history of U.S. sociology as a reception study of the poems of Walt Whitman. I chart the presence of Whitman’s Leaves across an array of Progressive Era periodicals, from flagship academic journals like the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and the American Anthropologist to short-lived little magazines like the Conservator and To-Morrow. Prominent intellectuals like Park and Ruth Benedict, forgotten academics such as Daniel Brinton, Edward A. Ross, and Howard Odum, and settlement house workers like Oscar Triggs and Parker Sercombe all engaged Whitman under the banner of “social science.” They recirculated poetic extracts to illuminate the range of issues—from mass media and crowd psychology to race relations and urban studies—that became the foci of modern sociology. As the fledgling discipline probed for new conceptual models of social development in a modern, secular age, this professionalizing, reform-minded class of social scientists employed nineteenth-century verse to explicate twentieth-century social theory. And more than most, Whitman’s poetry, which demanded empathy as well as observation, furnished the vocabulary for a compassionate, impartial and distinctively American sociology.
This paper tracks the reception history of “Song of Myself” across the career of Robert Ezra Park... more This paper tracks the reception history of “Song of Myself” across the career of Robert Ezra Park, a lifelong Whitman devotee and one of the most influential figures in early U.S. sociology.
Situating Park’s 1930 lecture on the poet to the Chicago Walt Whitman Fellowship within the development of his groundbreaking work on “human ecology,” I show how “Song of Myself” explained to Park the discipline’s fundamental relationship between social institutions and biological inheritance. In Whitman’s desire to “turn and live with animals,” rather than cope with the complications and tacit rules of social interaction, “Song” staged a socialized individual’s longing to escape from human culture into a pre-social past, throwing into relief a foundational principle of Park’s social theory. I contextualize this reception history in relation to the current scholarship in the rhetoric of science, portraying the various ways that Whitman’s presence haunted the conception of sociological research in the United States.
This paper argues for a renewed understanding of sociology’s historical role as a “third culture,... more This paper argues for a renewed understanding of sociology’s historical role as a “third culture,” between science and literature, by examining sociologist Edward A. Ross’ engagement with “Song of Myself” in his seminal work, Social Control (1901).
“Social control,” the idea that culturally-constituted belief systems exert greater control over human behavior than natural ability or legal governance, was a pioneering concept in the field. Emerging in the thick of progressive reform movements, and at the founding moment of sociology in the academy, Ross’s theory proposed that only the expert social investigator could guide society in the direction of rational and just progress, which, I contend, explains his attraction to Whitman.
Social Control demanded a seemingly impossible rhetorical pose for the sociologist, involving both impartial observation and interpersonal mediation. Ross seized on the absorptive “I” of “Song of Myself,” a figure he perceived as pre-ideological; Whitman’s “I” could at once witness and become master or slave, while denying neither.
In August of 1905, To-Morrow magazine (1903-1909)—a Chicago-based journal, subtitled A Monthly Ha... more In August of 1905, To-Morrow magazine (1903-1909)—a Chicago-based journal, subtitled A Monthly Handbook of the Changing Order—announced the creation of an institute for the “society of advanced thought and rational ideals, devoted to human growth and intellectual expansion”: the Walt Whitman-Herbert Spencer Center (10). The Center, lodged in the publishing offices of To-Morrow, lasted only two years; in that time it hosted a number of aspiring middle-class professionals and radical “free-thinkers,” and many veterans of the turn-of-the-century's Arts and Crafts and socialist movements, who participated in weekly lectures and poetry recitations, read in the ever-growing library of materials on science, politics, and literature, and honed their bookbinding and woodworking skills in the establishment’s handicrafts workshop.
The society’s leading literati, Oscar Lovell Triggs and Parker H. Sercombe, articulated the movements’ enigmatic politics—a welding of the republican morals of artisan labor onto a progressive faith in organizational improvement via evolutionary science—through the “mortising” of Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman, a pairing that “symbolize[d] the unity and harmony that may naturally coexist when contemplating the coherent intellectual grandeur of one and the emotional breadth and understanding of the other” (10).
This paper interrogates the motivations, practices, and consequences of the To-Morrow group’s Whitmanian (and to a lesser extent Spencerian) inspirations through an examination of the Center’s institutional culture: including recorded roundtable notes and photographs, reprintings of Whitman's images, poetry, and prose, and selections from remaining lectures.
I seek to demonstrate how the Spencer-Whitman Center, by situating Whitman as the romantic “moment” in a harmonious fusion between literature and science, utilized the poet to negotiate the ideas of social Darwinism and industrial democracy, establishing itself as a paradoxical cultural site of "antimodern modernism."
In “Art and Revolution,” Emma Goldman asserted that all art is revolutionary, for it exists “not... more In “Art and Revolution,” Emma Goldman asserted that all
art is revolutionary, for it exists “not to show [people] what they have been before, but to present them with a new vision of life.” For Goldman, no work of art embodied this spirit like Leaves of Grass : literature’s “greatest expression of man in revolt.”
This essay explores the asymmetrical connection of Whitman’s national, democratic poetics with Goldman’s internationalist, revolutionary anarchism, drawing out the dialectic of praxis, intimacy concretized in direct action, and theory, the imaginary animation of human potential, founded by Goldman in the processes of reading Leaves of Grass.
Goldman not only “uses” Whitman’s life and work rhetorically, to insist on the primacy of the emancipated individual as a pathway to community, but ferrets out an aesthetic insight key to her emergent political theory: that integral to the radical development of the individual is the role of reading. A creative, mediatory practice, reading turns on the interest, agency, and self-development of the subject. If, for Goldman, anarchism’s chief task was to plant the seeds of radical thought, Leaves of Grass provided the textual soil from which to cultivate the masses’ revolutionary potential; proof still that “we need Walt Whitman now more than ever.”
This paper offered a close reading of that scandalous last page of Mike Gold’s Jews without Money... more This paper offered a close reading of that scandalous last page of Mike Gold’s Jews without Money. Mapping the structure of the apostrophe onto the work’s discontinuous narrative, I recasted the narrator's embarrassing/triumphant call to the coming community as the revolutionary gesture’s necessary stay against narrative temporality.
Current and updated Fall 2019 syllabus for a Honors research seminar in the Public Humanities.
Current and updated Early American Literature syllabus for Fall 2019.
Updated "Discourse 3" syllabus from the multimodal Discourse sequence at Graceland University
Updated "Discourse 1" syllabus (from the multimodal Discourse sequence at Graceland University.)
An upper-division English course on the history of American labor poetry designed for comprehensi... more An upper-division English course on the history of American labor poetry designed for comprehensive exams.
January 29, 2016 - Graceland University English professors Timothy Robbins and Daniel Platt are j... more January 29, 2016 - Graceland University English professors Timothy Robbins and Daniel Platt are joined in conversation with Graceland graduate, Ognen Cemerski (BA English, 2000). Cemerski had recently published a Macedonian translation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick.