scholarly journals Licence poétique : de la bible dans Leaves of Grass

2017 ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Éric Athenot
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence

Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author’s first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. In the process, it traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the “US literature of experience” and the “Latin American literature of the reader.” Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and “misencounters” between US and Latin American authors. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the “common grounds” approach to literature across the Americas, the book advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Anxieties of Experience closes by exploring the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolaño moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a hundred years.


Author(s):  
P. C. Kemeny

The Watch and Ward Society was very effective at enforcing Protestant mores, especially through lobbying efforts and work as an extralegal police force that strove to enforce the state’s anti-obscenity laws. The anti-vice society employed three closely related strategies to combat the arguments of free love and free speech activists and to suppress the sale of obscene material. First, reformers lobbied state legislatures to pass more effective anti-obscenity statutes. Second, they demanded that the police enforce the laws, and they investigated book and magazine vendors to aid the police in their work. Finally, they pressured publishers and bookstore owners to refrain from selling objectionable materials. Examining the controversy over the publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1882–83 illustrates the organization’s effectiveness.


Poetics Today ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 395
Author(s):  
Lilach Lachman ◽  
Michael Moon
Keyword(s):  

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (4) ◽  
pp. 983-998
Author(s):  
Bonnie Carr O'Neill

Before Walt Whitman became the self-celebrating poet of Leaves of Grass, he was a professional journalist. This paper examines the journalism Whitman produced from 1840 to 1842 in the context of an emerging celebrity culture, and it considers celebrity's effects on the public sphere. It traces the penny press's personal style of journalism to both its artisan-republican politics and the formation of celebrity culture, in which celebrities assume status parallel to that of traditional representatives of authority. As editor of the Aurora, Whitman adopts the first-person, polemical style of the penny press and singles out prominent people for criticism. In other pieces, he presents himself as the ever-observant flâneur. As editor and as flâneur, he is a participant in and observer of the life of his community, and he assumes unassailable interpretive power. But he also regards his readers as fellow participants-observers who make judgments about the public figures he reports on. The tension between these positions is never resolved: Whitman's dialogic addresses to readers aim to extend the public sphere of critical debate even as Whitman holds steadfastly to his own social and political authority. Encouraging and modeling readers' negotiations over the meaning of public figures, he extends the features of celebrity culture to the public at large. His early journalism shows how and why it is so difficult to reconcile political and social community in the era of mass culture, and it highlights the complexities of the coexistence of celebrity and critical discourse in the personal public sphere.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frédéric Ache ◽  
Michel Imbert ◽  
Lucas Person ◽  
Alexandra Tsovma
Keyword(s):  

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