“Whitman and Saroyan: Singing the Song of America,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (Summer, 1992), pp. 16-24. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Whitman and Saroyan: Singing the Song of America
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 1992
Argues for the importance of Whitman in the work of William Saroyan and compares these writers' lives, examining Saroyan's statements about Whitman, especially in the essay "What Makes American Writing American." WHITMAN AND SAROYAN: SINGING THE SONG ~F AMERICA DICKRAN KOUYMJIAN "WHEN WAS THE BEGINNING OF AMERICAN WRITING?" William Saroyan asked in an essay of 1956. His answer: Opinions must vary. Facts themselves must vary, at least in how they are interpreted. In my opinion American writing began when the unschooled took to the business. This leaves out Emerson, but not Whitman. Leaves of Grass could not have been written in England, Wales, Scotland, or Ireland. Whitman himself probably couldn't have written what he wrote anywhere else in the world. In America, European man had an arena at last in which hope could be limitless, and anybody with sufficient intelligence, energy, and ability was free to achieve almost anything. l
The New Walt Whitman Studies, 2019
In this essay, I turn to _Conversations with Walt Whitman_, a fifty-one page memorial pamphlet composed in 1894 by Sadakichi Hartmann, a Japanese-German émigré to the United States. Published in 1895, the Conversations appeared three years after Whitman’s death. Hartmann’s _Conversations_ mark an occasion – a historical “setting” – in which later, postcritical turns to composition read not so much as wrong, but precisely backward – inverted in orientation. Hartmann’s _Conversations_ offer an image of the world in which two orientations toward critique and composition will appear self-evident: that institutions of critique in the United States are not that old; and that turns to the problem of composition in these States are not that new.
Walt Whitman’s Republic of Letters
Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America, 2010
Walt Whitman cuts so large a figure that readings of his work seem doomed to be fragmentary. What often emerges is a splitting apart of Whitman into contradictory and opposing poses. There is Whitman the solitary singer as against Whitman the political journalist; Whitman the imperial self as against Whitman the poet of democracy; Whitman the Romantic and/or antinomian ego as against Whitman the wound dresser; Whitman the homoerotic radical as against Whitman the defender of the “American Way.”
Imagining the Nation. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass
Following Foucault’s distrust of identity as possibly leading to the objectivation of the subject, Said founded his works on a conception of identity as an “essentially static notion” that served imperialism by reducing colonized peoples to immutable and negative characteristics. In the wake of Culture and Imperialism, a lot has been written upon the role that was played by novels and theatre plays in the constitution and preservation of national identities. Poetry, however, has not received such extended treatment and could bring new elements to our reflection. My aim is to study what in Whitman's works allowed him to play a role in the constitution of the American identity. A foundational figure for the Americans, Whitman produced a volume of poetry, Leaves of Grass, quite far from a mainstream volume representative of the spirit of a people. Contrary to what one may expect, it is rather a ground-breaking work inaugurating a new era both for world poetry and the American society. Whitman's position as a minority writer -in the sense of Deleuze- taking up a major role deserves our attention. Through what can be described as a litany of performative discourse Whitman questioned the American identity just as much as he made it become reality.