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Predavanje dr Karen Karbajner
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Predavanje gostujuće profesorke
dr Karen Karbiener,
New York University

Manhattan's Son Rises:
The Urban Working-Class Origins of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"

Četvrtak, 3. decembar 2009, 17.00-19.00 sati, sala 30/1
Filozofski fakultet, Novi Sad

Abstract: A boy from rural Long Island moves to New York City in 1823 and, without money or mentorship, conceives, writes, and self-publishes America’s declaration of cultural independence. This story remains one of the great mysteries of American literary scholarship. How did Walter Whitman-second son of a carpenter, grammar school dropout and sometime penny daily hack writer-become Walt Whitman?

Heart, mind, and soul went into the creation of Whitman’s radically new and distinctly American literature. Less obvious are the contributions made with his own hands. For the young Walter Whitman first learned to love language not at home or at school, but at work as a manual laborer and craftsman in New York City. During the period now known as New York’s “go ahead years” or the “seed-time of Leaves of Grass”, a revolution occurred in the printing and publishing industries. The rise of the American penny press in the early nineteenth century enabled a grammar school dropout to find employment at a Brooklyn printing office in 1831. In his later years, Whitman romanticized the working class origins of Leaves of Grass by describing his “initiation into the trade and mystery of our printing craft.” Learning to love the shape and feel of each letter as a printer’s apprentice, Whitman came to recognize extraordinary possibilities of these ordinary implements, and the poetry in prosaic employ.