2020-21 Academic Catalog

An interdisciplinary investigation of the burgeoning, brash, alluring Other that the young Walter Whitman found in New York in the 1850s. Considering "Leaves of Grass," as well as his journalistic, "self-help," and political writings, we will reconstruct how Whitman found his muse, his voice, and his distinctively modern and democratic subject in the geography, demographics, markets, politics, and erotics of New York: "O City / Behold me! Incarnate me as I have incarnated you! I have rejected nothing you have offered me!--whom you adopted, I have adopted; good or bad..."