미국 문화권력의 청교도적 뿌리와 윌트 휘트만의 수용

Abstract

Jihee Han (Gyeongsang National U)Walt Whitman has long been identified as the representative American poetwhom Ralph Waldo Emerson expected in his famous essays “Nature” and “ThePoet” and also who manifested Emerson’s transcendental poetic vision of theAmerican Self in Leaves of Grass. However, in many of his poems Whitmanexpresses his poetic purpose of singing of “the form complete,” and as much ashe sings of one’s soul, he sings of the physiognomy and physiology of one’sbody. Given his clear announcement of a new poetic project of “materialism,” itis only doing justice to Whitman that we approach his sense of the Americanself in terms of his conception of “the form complete.”Thus in this essay I try to sublimate both the conservative approach to iden-tify Whitman’s poetic project in the frame of Emersonian transcendental poet-ics and the political approach to emphasize Whitman’s radical poetic vision ofbody, gender, and sexuality. Rather, noticing the fact that some scholars stillconsider Whitman’s discourse of the body and Sexuality not proper to be talkedin the classroom setting, I will focus on the cultural politics surrounding themaking of Whitman as the representative American poet. With Greenblatt’snotion of “cultural poetics” and Graff’s notion of “repressive tolerance,” I willfirst contextualize Whitman’s discourse of “materialism” as a counter-cultureto Boston-based mainstream genteel culture. Then examining Whitman’s con-ception of “the form complete” from Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology, I willtry to highlight the point that his materialism is something beyond the level of the“cultural distintion” that Beach formulates. Secondly, I will trace the history ofWhitman scholarship and examine how the very genteel class, who hadrepressed Whitman in the nineteenth century, now in the twentieth century