Fall ’21–Whitman and Melville

Almost exact contemporaries, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville were among the most formally experimental writers of the nineteenth century. Both were also highly engaged with the political and social turmoil of their times — perhaps most dramatically, both published book-length collections of poetry chronicling the Civil War within a year of the war’s end. This course places Whitman and Melville in conversation with each other and with the issues that infuse their work and inform our understanding of American identity: racism and slavery, constructions of gender and sexuality, competing notions of freedom, the meaning of “nature,” and the future of democracy.