Brooks on DV in the Atlantic
Berthoff, “Democratic Practice, Pragmatic Vistas” [Louise Rosenblatt, Dewey]
Rosenblatt, Louise M. “Whitman’s Democratic Vistas and the New ‘Ethnicity.’”
Yale Review 67 (1978): 199-200.
Dewey refers to WW in Public and its Problems, addressing machine as tool for communication [LW 2: 350]
Education in a medium where things have social uses is necessary for intellectual as well as for moral growth. The more closely and more directly the child learns by entering into social situations, the more genuine and effective is the knowledge he gains. Since power for dealing with remoter things comes from power gained in managing things close to us, “the direct sense of reality is formed only in narrow social circles, like those of family life. True human wisdom has for its bedrock an intimate knowledge of the immediate environment and trained capacity for dealing with it. The quality of mind thus engendered is simple and clear-sighted, formed by having to do with uncompromising realities and hence adapted to future situations. It is firm, sensitive and sure of itself.”
“The opposite education is scattering and confused; it is superficial, hovering lightly over every form of knowledge, without putting any of it to use: a medley, wavering and uncertain.” The moral is plain: Knowledge that is worthy of being called knowledge, training of the intellect that is sure to amount to anything, is obtained only by participating intimately and ac-tively in activities of social life. This is Pestalozzi’s great positive contribution. It represents an insight gained in his own personal experience; for as an abstract thinker he was weak. It not only goes beyond Rousseau, but it puts what is true in Rousseau upon a sound basis. It is not, however, an idea that lends itself readily to formal statement or to methods which can be handed from one to another. Its significance is illustrated in his own early undertaking when he took twenty vagabond children into his own household and proceeded to teach them by means of farm pursuits in summer and cotton spinning and weaving in the winter, connecting, as far as possible, book instruction with these active occupations. It was illustrated, again later in his life, when he was given charge of a Swiss village, where the adults had been practically wiped out for resistance to an army of Napoleon. When a visitor once remarked: “Why, this is not a school; this is a household,” Pestalozzi felt he had received his greatest compliment.
chapter 7: relation of school to community: discussion of Gary, IN schools. One of the schools is named ‘Emerson’ No other reference to the name [disucssion of a school that is industrial, cooking classes, etc. Perhaps to connect with Emerson on work.
The “organic curriuclum”: reference to the fairhope, AL school: education as natural development
same chapter: p. 34. on ‘handwork“
Reading notes
Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work [Oxford: Blackwell, 2005] Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price
An introduction that focuses on whitman’s writing life, and particularly on the emergence of his writing in manuscript form—noting that the poetry manuscripts were neglected in the Collected Works. Also interesting that it thus emerges from their work on the digital archive, where they began collecting and coding manuscripts and book variations.
Is it possible to say then that the digital project and its possibilities enabled these scholars to return us in this book more materially to whitman and his script and books? The digital as a re-scripting in the sense of remediation of Whitman and his logic and lessons in scripting.
“Introduction”
ix : note his process, continual revision—[my note: and tied to the ‘chaos’ of his words, his litter-rary clutter: though this is left out of the product, noticeable in the manuscripts, in the notes of SD and memoranda, etc; so the book, like the archive, returns us to process]
“His poetry was written to initiate response, revision, process, and his own compositional techniques emphasized his refusal to reach conclusion. Whitman was the ultimate reviser, continually reopening his poems and books to endless shuffling, retitling, editing, and reconceptualizing. Leaves of Grass was Whitman’s title for a process more than a product: every change in his life and in his nation made him reopen his book to revision.”
xi : note their desire, in the archive, to address the problems/gaps of the 22 volume Collected Writings (NYU) and its gaps, failures. One key one: omission of his poetry manuscripts. The 3 volume Variorum Edition of LG intended to deal with all manuscripts, but ended up only with book publications.
The archive’s availability of the manuscripts: “a development that is revealing a previously unknown side of Whitman’s creative process.”
Re-scripting as in: “rethinking Whitmna’s life in terms of his script, those thousands of manuscript pages that he left behind and which, to this day, have not been adequately studied.”
The implicit logic here—of their study and of Whitman (and presumably of the archive): metonymy
Xii : “Our book pursues the metonymic relation that Whitman famously employed between himself and his work (“this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man’ [LG 505]).”
[and as I show with SD and the notion of specimen, it is this metonymy that is both indicative of the clutter and distraction of the work and of the potential for relationship with a reader, the very potential of the reading.]
Xiv: they note this with reference to SD
“He incorporates Memoranda During the War into a wildly suggestive new kind of autobiographical prose that he names Specimen Days, capturing his sense of identity as a series of indicative and often contradictory moments instead of a clear unity.”
“Whitman’s life created a chaos of words, printed and unprinted, finished and barely begun.”
Their appendix focuses on editorial attempts to deal with that chaos, including their own at the digital archive.
Reiterated later in book—with suggestion of what the archive (in its process) can do and why the CW fails
133: “His writings are such a mass and scatter that any ‘complete’ print edition is doomed to become increasingly incomplete, patched-together, more difficult to use—eventually as chaotic as the materials it sets out to organize.”
So the issue is a need to represent (remediate?) the chaos of the writing without entirely effacing it or succumbing to it.
[opening lines for the distraction paper?
The writing of America’s large poet, Walt Whitman, container of multitudes, is wonderfully distracting. Such distraction, I suspect, is not the experience that many of Whitman’s readers have of him in schools. ]
Chapter 2: “’Many Manuscript Doings and Undoings’: The Road toward Leaves of Grass”
19: hybrid forrm: mix of vernacular and scriptural [RWE: Gita and Herald; 25]
Including interest in technologies.
One way to think interest in ‘blog’ or new writing media
21: linking of his created/celebrated self and distraction, dispersion
A further link to new writing media: hybridity, also metonymy—the drift of the writing, in its associations (links), suggestions. The multitudinous identity of text that iinforms and is informed by the multiplicity of selves.
“He celebrated the self, but not a self that was narrowly and securely defined—rather a self that took the risks fo imaginative absorption and creative dispersion.”
Tie this to his interest in the metonymy of his book, his conflation of book and identiy
“his great metonymic invention—to turn human types into printed type, to ink character on a page, to turn a book into a man.”
Argues this metonymy is no mere metaphor. Thus arguing for understanind a materiality of Whitman’s process, evident in the processes of the books and the revision (and even the photography)—his involvement and interest in the physical book. [I can connect this to Remediation and the materiality of virtual empathy and contact through vr; sections on remediated self]
“He conceived of the ‘body of his work’ as something more than a dead metaphor. Thus he was always engaged in the act of bookmaking as well as poetry writing.”
22: thus seem to be dealing with a hypermediacy that Whitman knows (as printer, also in his culture, as a writer) and cultivates in his work.
Interest in book making over book writing.
And this is the hypermediacy that has been lost with the exclusion of the manuscript doings, as well as all the book making—sense of an immediate, immaculate Whitman (26)
This is not the Whitman I know from SD and the specimen, the Whitman that prizes convulsiveness.
29: cites WWC 5:390
Where he emphasizes that his writing is both about ceaseless revision; but also an eye for the final form in print
“having been a printer myself, I have what may be called an anticipatory eye…
I would argue that this anticipatory eye is also part of the metonymy of the work: to extent that it extends to reader, links to what Whitman will think of as the gymnasts sturggle: not the book but the reader of the book.
Also: its emphasis is on the emergence/appearance into print and type; ‘how a thing will turn up in the type”: a dynamic between writing and printing, rather than the binary (forced by print) of writing or printing
Thus he wrote as a reader; but he is talking about a confluence of reader and writer that is not contained; and that might be best considered in terms of how hypertext reading (our latest version of the technology he is imagining) creates a conflated ‘wreader’
The reader’s anticipatory eye of course (and we know this from hypertext) brings us back to distraction. To the extent it challenges the sense of authority of the print text (removed from manuscript, from evolving book, from supplemental texts), it brings us the parts of the actual distraction. Do we read Whitman more as he wanted to be read? Yes, if we take him at his word with regard to ‘convulsiveness.’ And probably not. Do we read him closer to how he was writing? It seems to me we do. So the question I pose: is it better for students, or let’s say at least initial readers, to come to an author like Whitman with or without the convulsiveness of how the writing emerges and evolves. Is it better to provide an authoritative edition, even if that is a fiction?
Perhaps one answer I can suggest: my own experience with having the books in hand (and which the digital archive is providing my students from a distance). Perhaps we can at least agree on the value of returning the writing to the books, and let the metonymy of the books (if not the mass and mess of culture impinging on that book) be a middle ground. In my case: it was as simple as seeing the butterfly portrait in the book—and its suggestive position. [an image, as I see it, of the casual and the crafted—which then opens up the larger book]
This return to the embodiment of the medium I would argue is in line with digital distraction—where virtual embodiment is possible.
30: the archive is collecting more recently discovered manuscript fragments that are later than the notebooks (which have been available for 100 years)
32-33: proto-word processing
Rearranging of lines [which perhaps we can do with the whole of Song of Myself or Leaves]: another sense of digital; lines are arbitrarily coded, thus movable; insert hyperlink here? [34: interchangeable—like the democratic scatter he writes about]
38: W’s composting faith
We gain a sense of whitman actually writing (tracing the crunching cow line from notebook to drafts to pinted version)
40: note that we will only have rudimentary understanding of his compositional process until all manuscripts are gathered. That is the task for scholars and raises question fo textual scholarship. But for readers, I think we can more quickly move toward an understanding through the digital
That is: my interest is more in readers as writers—classroom as workshop for student; less with the question of authoritative
55: his manuscripts and changes in editions ‘offer us a living workshop of his poetic development”
46: turns impersonal act of reading into an intimate experience
66: critical debate regarding 1860 Leaves and the ‘Live Oak’ poems in the Calamus cluster. “Lying behind all of the familiar printed poems in LG are manuscripts…”
70: 1860 Leaves, “a visually chaotic volume”
Key here [though I haven’t pursued this particular section with students, but might want to]: back to metonymy of body of text, of virtual empathy (anticipatory eye blending into participatory I of reader)
71: body remained Whitman’s subject, but it was never separate from the body of the text…to enact the physical embrace of poet and reader.
Interwining of sexual and textual politics: ideas pass through the bodies of texts
[tie to the virtual embodiment of the medium] the material objects of books.
Which ties in to the convulsiveness of war memoranda—the dispersions of bodies that this textual body then seeks to convey
92: physical form of Sequel to Drum Taps, added to Drum-Taps
95: the longest sentence: sentence frgament: Dead in this war [Million Dead]
[another version of virtual empathy—which I earlier tie to photography. In the case of the digital archive, it is the reproducibility of the digital (emerging from the photographic) that thus allows the reader into the writer’s composting and composition.
A summing and summoning: physical presence
This passage then in theory about the kind of reproduction we get in digital archive: the dispersions of the summing of textual representation (turning words into 1s and 0s) and the summoning of presence (and even aura—see the essay on Electronic reprodction) this yields.
This is whitman’s claims for the notebooks: the blood stains.
This is whitman’s metonymic trick to the extreme: the attempt to make the printed version the notebook.
Can tie this to abstraction vs. distraction: Whitman wants parts of the actual distraction, resisting the abstraction of a summation that doesn’t also summon (which implices resistance to comprehending). Can see this and the resistance to the ‘real war’ as a variant of what Mcgann sees with the textual edition (forced into abstractions).
So it is not so much that this passage is restored by the digital archive [though there is something to fact that it is at least accessible to the reader of the poetry, where it is not in most print versions of LG, which generally exclude the prose]. It is that the focus in the passage is an interest in a textual archive that resists such abstractions, that conveys distractions.
Can then take this back to level of which text we read (not so much if we read the manuscripts): the 1867 edition [98] jarring textual effects, sewing parts in; whitman’s struggle (like the nations) with reconstructing: where the war poems in their distractions seem at odds with the earlier poems of absorption.
But if this chaos is abstracted, don’t we then loose again Whtiman’s textual body?
[note: discussion by Price and Belasco in their curriculum project on spiders, note that the web provides more of the fludity; also that what we know as whitman’s spider poem is abstraction that they recover through manuscripts
http://www.classroomelectric.org/volume3/belasco-price/introduction.html
how digital presentation of the poetry of Whitman and Dickinson can suggest something closer to the fluidity of their compositional process than can the static form of print.
Price, interview early on about formation of the archive:
http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/innovistas/whitman.html
Eventually, our project will work to break down the older textual and bibliographic models on which the NYUP Collected Writings was based. By making accessible Whitman's compulsive self-revisions, our project will overcome the print-based imperative to privilege a single text of Whitman and will replace it with a hypertextual model that emphasizes the ways his work was continually a process, always in progress.
112: phg (and the absorption/reception of the plate) as model for his absoprtive lines.
Can argue that this technological analogy extends to digital: on the matter of dispersion/asborption.
The key link: metonymy (not the completeness of the photo, but the incompleteness of the process: reproducibility). The new metonymies of hyperlinks and reader response.
In this sense, the distractions of the digital text are very much part of its absorptive potential. [tie here to Hayles: the electronic shifts to focus not on absent/presence, but pattern/randomness—what enables the digital dispersion to take place
Consider: to extent that this tie to my photographic memory focus: the process behind the print—could argue that that is also reaching toward the digital, beyond the analog.
131: collected writings: still incomplete 50 years later; even the finished ones unfinsihed; undiscovered materials render printed volumes outdated by time they appeared.
133: His writings are such a mass and scatter…
[this is where the hypermediacy of the digital effectively remediates the scatter, the distraction: in effect, rather than fighting it, joining it—or foregrounding it;
Or in hayles sense: switching the paradigm from presence/asbsence to patter/randomness
134: note their theoretical commitment to presenting all versions, not privileging the deathbed.
Can see this as a privileging of distraction, dispersion (even multi-tasking), and resisting the traditional definition of close-reading (closely reading an authoritative edition, but not closely reading variations). Again, pattern over presence.
135-6: issue of how the digital technology is allowing closer reading: images that will allow future users to closely examine the manuscripts [beyond what naked eye can see]
138: using example of the spider evolution poem
“Our work in progress..track illuminating shifts…steps in a compositional evolution …that an electronic edition can explore in its entirety.
What I mean by connecting the reproducibilty of 19th technology to digital. Whitman with photography was interested and took advantage of the process, not the static print (which isn’t static). Traditional print can re-print photos, but has problems with the process of the photography (and the poetry). The digital remediates process in this sense (in its hypermediacy, informing but also resisting the immediacy of ‘complete’ and final edition)
140: being added to archive
Whitman’s mediated words. So the issue for me is not just that these can be searched; but that they represent (in the exclusion from CW), a return to or re-opening of how Whitman’s words engage mediation.
[save for my conclusion: where error is focused on the crossing of boundaries, the wandering of vision; not the impossibility of reading]
They raise challenges to traditional notions of singualr authority,e tc (138)—challenges certainly that poststructural practice and theory has brought to scholarship.
Though I see the issue here not for deconstructive potential (what I might call ruminant textuality), as for the radiant textuality (returning to the process and mediation that exists in the world of writing and print and text). Or, if it is ruminant, it is not a textuality that eats itself, so much as a textuality that participates (as a cow does, as Whitman knows) in the composting process. This potential of the digital and hypertextual (this shift towards or back to, multi-disciplinarity, multiplicity of text and author, circularity): call it part of Whitman’s composting faith. [p. 38], his awareness and interest and anticipation of the distractions and associations—the links—of an electronic body of work.
143: advantages of digital: tagging
Digita surrogates of original manuscripts, etc
Textual expressiveness (including visual): 144: McGann, ‘bibliographic codes’
145: their final word. Electronic editions, unlike print, are issued as work in progress, including readers as active agents in continuing creation.
“the perfect medium for an author who was always revising and reordering..”
Ed—essay from 2001 where he mentions hypotext; description at end of what the hypertext offers: reader as co-creator
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/introduction/introframeset_files/projecting.html
[connections with lanham]
Lanham emphasizes the abstractions of traditional print vs the distractions of the world/behavior that traditional print tries to resist. Whitman’s interest in book making (over book writing): I would read as an interest in the emergent quality of books that traditional alphabet (rather than alphabet that thinks) occludes. An interest in a book to be looked at, not through. Tie this in with his metonymy as well.
Whitman’s goal was the multitudinous self, a self capacious enough to identify with the vast variety of human types that American democracy was producing: he loved America’s “loose drift of character, the inkling through random types” (LG, 186), and Whitman’s pun on “ink” and “type” here would become his great metonymic invention—to turn human types into printed type, to ink character on a page, to turn a book into a man. “Camerado, this is no book,” he writes, “Who touches this touches a man” (LG, 505), and throughout Leaves, we can feel an identity straining to make human contact through the print and paper: “I pass so poorly with paper and types . . . . I must pass with the contact of bodies and souls” (LG 1855, 57).
This extraordinary conflation of book and identity grew out of Whitman’s experience as a printer and a newspaper editor. He was always conscious of the way that different types and different page sizes and different titles altered otherwise identical words: for him, paper and type were more than a vehicle to present poems, they were indeed bodies themselves. He conceived of the “body of his work” as something more than a dead metaphor. Thus he was always engaged in the act of bookmaking as well as poetry writing. He knew how to set type, and he knew how books were printed and bound. He wanted to have an actual physical involvement in the creation of the physical object of the book, and so he set a few pages of type for the first (1855) edition of Leaves and chose the large-paper format to give his long lines room to stretch across the page. Late in his life, Whitman noted how “I sometimes find myself more interested in book making than in book writing . . . the way books are made—that always excites my curiosity: the way books are written—that only attracts me once in a great while” (WWC, 4:233). He never stopped being a printer, and his various editions of Leaves all show the marks of his idiosyncratic printer’s eye.
Note that lanham refers to editing as prime example of at vision; so whitman’s printers eye clearly that.
Larger pedagogical stake (and why I use Re-Scripting and whtiman as case-study: to return to my american literature class–about the emergency of american literature, but more generally as any literature class, about the compostion of literature, the making, not merely the reception of books–the more than dead metaphor, the buried metonymies of the body of work, the processes of writing. As emerson reminds us, these metonymies are not just in book terms; the very foundation of processes of thinking that inform the making/writing that inform the books–we need to learn this metonymy.
