Alden's+Whitman+Project(ile)

Cultural Object Assignment: Our relationship in the United States to the authoritative notion of “the president” is one which has changed over the course of our nation’s history. The position as a singular secular leader has been largely mythicized, fetishized, and codified over the years owing this continuous transformation to the introduction of various social attitudes regarding governmental responsibility and culpability; new technologies of mass communication narrowing the “rhetorical distance” between the actual position of “president” and “the nation;” the notion of the individual’s position in a liberal democracy; and the feudalistic history of the absolute monarch and the reification of that position being analogous to that of “the president.” “The president” is often viewed as that seminal public figure to which the individuals that comprise a nation ultimately deferred to in terms of social and moral legislation. Our insistence in the sanctity of law and faith in the liberal democracy imbue the office of “the president” with a certain paradoxical power dynamic – for ideally “the president” speaks for the people and again, rather romantically, answers to the collective, yet conversely the people and the collective are subject to the decisions (this is a reductive simplification of the liberal democratic process, for the sake of argument) of “the president.” Using Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and the cultural object of “the president” within it (both explicitly identified, and implicitly inferred through deference to convention) take some time to write down, informally, some thoughts on how Whitman’s depiction and engagement with the notion of “the president,” “leadership,” and “institutions” address a very individualized sentiment. Does this sentiment make concessions for the collective, or does it find its articulation ended in the absolutist approach of the self-aggrandized individual spirit above all else? How does Whitman’s engagement with “the president” translate to your own experience with institutional and governmental leadership in today’s society? What and where are the differences? Results: Primary Goal: Hopefully through this assignment design and its application and subsequent engagement, the student will arrive at various understandings of this overarching question: “How does Whitman’s “Song of Myself” locate/define the individual’s space within the sphere of the socio-cultural/socio-political collective?” I believe that this question is important in the context of Whitman, as all too often readers of “Song of Myself” celebrate what I will call the “one-sided” approach to Whitman’s individualism – the reassertion of that all too American notion of supremacy of the singular essence, without focusing on the subtleties that Whitman’s hyperindividual still exists within a collective of individuals. This also culturally locates the text in contemporary cultural and American studies, in the sense that the discursive space upon which the relationship of the individual to the collective is still, and will always be, in a constant state of articulation and rearticulation, ad infinitum. Secondary Goals: In working through Whitman’s text, while keeping the cultural object of “the president” at the forefront of the reader’s interpretative lens, I am hoping that students will see the rhizomatic nature of poetry and, more expansively, all cultural texts; that we cannot divorce the text from every temporal cultural context – before the text, “during” the text, and after the text. I wish the students to critically navigate the line of subjectivity in poetry with a critical awareness, in the sense that while there is no clearly delineated “right” or “wrong” way to interpret and synthesize the work, there is still is a general spectrum of signification that we operate along, and here is the intersection of the individual and the collective (the relationship I ultimately wish to call attention to). Evidence of Learning: To be completely frank, this is the part of backward design I have the most difficultly trying to visualize – for I would generally be inclined to have the students engage in a informal rhetorical response/written assignment – but to be able to quantify the actual evidence of learning is still something difficult for me to comprehend. I think that I would naturally judge subjectively, the level of engagement I feel the student possesses both with the primary text and the final product of the end assignment – the varying level of degrees are problematic for me. Perhaps apart of my problem is the notion of the assignment being a “final product” – I don’t like that, as I feel it rather synthetically truncates the discourse. So I’m really at a loss to formulate how I can view and understand that learning is actually taking place. Design: As a generalized skill set, for this assignment the student will need to be able to critically engage with the poem through sustained analysis. How do we get them there? I don’t know. So I’m designing this assignment from the presupposition that they already can – bad form, sure, but I don’t understand how on my end of thing, I’m to push them in that direction. I’d like them to have at least a cursory knowledge of Whitman, but most importantly, my overarching question is one which I feel possesses relevancy in the contemporary context, so most importantly I’d like the students to be able to tie in the cultural object of “the president” and its relationship to the poem to a much more sustained analysis and projection into and on their current experiences with the collective/individual dichotomy. Collaboration here is the most important, and it is essentially collaboration on a variety of argumentative planes – collaboration with the cultural object in its temporal context and outside of it; collaboration with the poem; collaboration with their contemporary individual experiences; and most importantly the physical and literal collaboration of the individual (student) with a collective (the class) as means to present, engage with, and disseminate each other’s perspectives. I suppose out of these activities, the engaged analysis with the poem would have to come before the collaboration with experience, and collaborations with the collective/class.