Re-Writing the Eugenic Whitman in Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days 2005

Year 2014, Issue: 39, 89 - 112, 01.04.2014

Perin Gürel

Abstract

Walt Whitman’s poetry and essays weave complex rhetorical links between American nature, the human body, and democracy.2 At the conclusion of his autobiographical collection of prose, Specimen Days 1882 , Whitman lucidly cemented these links in an essay titled “Nature and Democracy—Morality.” The poet, “before departure,” emphasized his belief that democracy, “as manifested in the grand races of mechanics and work people,” needs to be recharged, “fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds [….]” 200 .

References

• Aspiz, Harold. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Urbana: U. of Illinois P.,1980. Print.
• Clarke, Adele. Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and The Problems of Sex. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Print.
• Cowley, Malcolm. “Introduction.” Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. 1855. New York: Penguin Books, 1959. vii-xxxvii. Print.
• Cunningham, Michael. Laws for Creations. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print.
• ------. Specimen Days: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2005. Print.
• Degler, Carl. In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Print.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet.” (1844). Bartleby.com Web. 23 March. 2014.
• Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Print.
• Ginsberg, Allen. “A Super Market in California.” Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 2002. 29-30. Print.
• Gutman, Huck. “I Sing the Body Electric.” (1855). Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Eds. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. The Walt Whitman Archive. Web. 17 Dec. 2006.
• Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. 149-84. Print.
• Killingsworth, Jimmie M. “Human Body.” In Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Eds. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. The Walt Whitman Archive. Web. 17 Dec.
• ------. “Tropes of Selfhood: Whitman’s ‘Expressive Individualism’.” The Life after the Life: The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman. Ed. Robert K. Martin. Iowa City: University. of Iowa Press, 1992. 39-52. Print.
• Loving, Jerome. “Emerson, Ralph Waldo [1809-1882].” In Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Eds. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. The Walt Whitman Archive. Web. 17 Dec. 2006.
• Martin, Robert K., Ed. The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life After the Life. Iowa City: U. of Iowa P., 1992. Print.
• Pound, Ezra. “A Pact.” (1913). PoemHunter.com. Web. 17 Dec. 2006.
• Sorisio, Carolyn. Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879. Athens: U. of Georgia P., 2002. Print.
• Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass. 1855. (1855 First Edition Text), Radford, Va.: Wilder Publications, 2008. 25-86. Web. 23 March. 2014.
• ------. “Preface.” Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. 1855. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. 5-24. New York: Penguin Books, 1959. 5-24. Print.
• ------. Specimen Days and Collect. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. Print.
• ------. “Democratic Vistas” (1871). 203-258. Specimen Days and Collect. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. 203-58. Print.
• ------. “One’s-Self I Sing” (1867). The Walt Whitman Archive. Web. 18 Dec. 2006.
• ------. “To Foreign Lands” (1860). The Walt Whitman Archive. Web. 18 Dec. 2006.
• ------. “Song at Sunset” (1860). The Walt Whitman Archive. Web. 18 Dec. 2006.
• ------. Starting From Paumanok (1860). The Walt Whitman Archive. Web. 18 Dec. 2006.
• [Whitman, Walt]. “Walt Whitman and His Poems.” United States Review 5 (Sep. 1855): 205-12. Print.
• The Walt Whitman Archive. Web. 18 Dec. 2006.
• Wilson, Eric. “Whitman’s Rhizomes.” Arizona Quarterly 55.3 (Autumn 1999): 1-21. Print.