Walt Whitman and the making of North American Literature (1855-1867)

Author(s)

Bruno Gambarotto

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2006-04-28

Examining board members

Jorge Mattos Brito de Almeida; Viviana Bosi; Maria Clara Bonetti Paro

• Advisor: Jorge Mattos Brito de Almeida

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze some of the decisive moments in the making of North American poetry, determined by the development, from 1855 to 1867, of the four initial editions of Walt Whitman\'s Leaves of Grass. The choice of these remarkable moments serves to underline the engaged feature of Whitman´s poetical accomplishment, which implied not the mere transposition of European literary thought into the New World, but mainly the formal constitution of a national poetry fit for the social environment of the United States. In this sense, the analysis of these four Leaves of Grass´ editions (1855, 1856, 1861, 1867) presupposes two complementary ways: firstly the acknowledgment of Whitman´s poetry as a response to the social tensions in North American midnineteenth century, when modernity, led by free labor and industrialization, collides with colonial and pre-modern social structures, based upon slavery and the very descentralized commercial Republic constitution; secondly the literary configuration of these tensions, in which we observe elements of the literary Romanticism dialetically linked to local forms of expression, some of them alien to the literary achievements of the Old World, but reinforced by the founding project of a national literature. To attend these questions, this dissertation recovers the long tradition of Walt Whitman studies - dedicated in the present time to the historical revisioning of the poet´s works centered almost exclusively in the North American social experience - by the light of the Brazilian critical tradition, in which very important concepts and debates over the periferical position of New World literatures were consolidated. This theoretical perpective allows us not only to place Leaves of Grass in a wider perspective of New World literatures but also to build a indirect comparative view that rests upon some important questions to the North American and Brazilian literary traditions, as the engaged ethos of their literary elites; the search for new literary forms; the lyrical affirmative representation of national individuals; the economical and ethical responses to slavery; and the ambiguous and contradictory relation with European literary movements. (AU)