Super Whitman 1855
Resource
過量身體:惠特曼作品中的民主與超能 (MOST 108-2410-H-002-038)
Journal
CONCENTRIC-LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
Journal Volume
47
Journal Issue
1
Pages
295
Date Issued
2021-03
Author(s)
Abstract
This article tracks several thematic, formal, and political confluences between Walt Whitman’s poetry and the superhero genre. To that end, I read the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) through the optics of the popular superhero, a staple of US culture that Whitman proleptically announced and whose interpretive frame, I argue, revitalizes Whitman’s democratic vision. Whereas this vision has often been dismissed as naïve, if not outright jingoistic, its re-articulation as a superhero narrative opens up a non-complacent democratic culture attentive to deliberation, dialogue, and dissent. For instance, despite Whitman’s self-fashioning as a proto-vigilante superhero, his poems evince superheroes’ uneasy fit—as extralegal defenders of the law—in a democratic society. After locating this tension between individual and popular sovereignty in political theory, superhero studies, and Whitman’s early works and influences, I confirm the democratic usefulness of a superhero-inspired return to Whitman by examining a comics adaptation of Leaves of Grass: Robert Sikoryak’s Song of Myself! (2013). Through an aesthetic borrowed from Marvel’s comics of the Silver Age (1956-1969), Sikoryak unearths unexpected connections between Whitman’s poetry, superheroes, and a deliberative public sphere—an experimental collision worth considering in light of rising populisms and disaffection.
Event(s)
"‘Unconquerable and simple’: Whitman, Democracy, Comics.” 15th Annual Conference of the German Society for Comics Studies. Online. October 8, 2020..
Subjects
Democracy; superhero; Walt Whitman; Leaves of Grass; deliberation; flesh; Robert Sikoryak
Publisher
NATL TAIWAN NORMAL UNIV, COLL INT STUDIES & SOCIAL SCIENCES
Type
journal article
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代表作 (#2).pdf
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5.58 MB
Format
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