Walt Whitman: a current bibliography

[Chapter 3, "Moral Crusades: Race, Risk, and Walt Whitman's Afterlives" (165-204), examines several post-9/11 American novels, including Gayle Brandeis's Self Storage and Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, and notes that "both Brandeis and Cunningham invoke the works of Walt Whitman as an axis around which national (and occasionally nationalist) discourses rotate"; argues that both these novels "use Whitman as a historical springboard to pinpoint the dangers that average Americans encounter in their daily lives, outlining a post-9/11 riskscape that complicates what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck refers to as the 'risk society' of late modernity"; goes on to analyze how Brandeis builds "on the poet's egalitarian vision that makes the business of one man the business of all mankind and vice versa," using "Whitman as shorthand for the vigilant paranoia that befell even categorically 'blue' California after the 9/11 attacks," and evoking "the inflationary empathy that Whitman's work, taken at face value, seems to propagate," even while she also associates W hitman with "an inflated Americanism that leads the novelist to take recourse to the poet whenever the moral purity and preeminence of the United States are at stake," and finally uses Whitman "not so much [to] revitalize the self as impoverish it," stripped bare to "an empty form"; argues that in Cunningham's work (especially "The Children's Crusade") "Whitman's presence . . . is at once more elliptical and more intense," since Whitman is "equally lucky whether or not he makes a moral choice," while Cunningham "longs for an ethics of preference" to "fill the space left behind by a vacuous ethics of risk" that "may in the end revert to racial difference as its principal site of distinction."] [Examines Whitman's "annotation practices" as part of a project "to begin to gather Walt Whitman's annotations and marginalia into one digital space" for the online Walt Whitman Archive; argues that "Whitman's annotations reveal a composition process that connects his poetry (and more broadly his intellectual life), both physically and semantically, to other printed materials circulating in the nineteenth century," and proposes that the "clippings, pastings, and pinnings the poet used in his marginalia . . . enact various forms of close relation between reading and writing for Whitman"; analyzes "a specific late example of Whitman's marginalia, consisting of a series of notes by Whitman in a book of poetry by John