As I've been fighting off a cold, I missed our lab class on Tuesday, regrettably. However, I've been trying to fool around with the TokenX feature of the Whitman Archive on my own, with no luck. I can't figure out how to get the damn thing to work, but I'll try again another day.
In the meantime, I read a few of my classmates' blog posts, and Professor Hanley's instructions on Ning, and after re-visiting the Whitman Archive sight, I have discovered a crossing over. In playing with the text and shuffling things around, people are doing something that Whitman did with his own poetry. On the Archive site, under the "Current Criticism" section, Hershel Parker examines Whitman's disassembled and reassembled work "Live Oak, with Moss," asserting that the poem is a "gay manifesto." According to the article, Whitman first copied the poem into a notebook, then took the notebook apart because the work was just too scandalous to remain intact (check it out http://www.whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/liveoak.html ). He later inserted parts of the poem into various other works, the "Calamus" section in the 1860 version of "Leaves of Grass," to name one. Anyway, I found it interesting that our assignment paralleled the very actions of the writer we're studying.
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yep . . .Whitman considered his own poem as a kind of granular, bricolaged production . . . to what extent does the Archive allow us to use the poem the same way? why would we want to? what would the gains be?
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