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

Authors

  • Tia Byer MSc in United States Literature and Cultural Values, Department of Literatures, Languages & Cultures, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.46827/ejls.v2i2.189

Keywords:

Walt Whitman, Materialism, Derrida, proletariat

Abstract

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.

Author Biography

  • Tia Byer, MSc in United States Literature and Cultural Values, Department of Literatures, Languages & Cultures, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

    Tia Byer recently obtained a Postgraduate Degree in US Literature and Cultural Values from The University of Edinburgh, with a dissertation entitled “Transatlantic Flirtation and Cultural Insecurity: A Postcolonial Reading of Cosmopolitanism in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Henry James’s The Europeans and Daisy Miller”. She received her Undergraduate Degree in English Literature from York St John University and has previously published research in areas including Native American literature, The American Renaissance, Caribbean literature and song, dystopian fiction and African American fiction.

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Published

2020-06-26

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 2 (2020)

Section

Articles

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