‘Dash me with Amorous Wet, I can Repay You’: Relational Ethics, Queer Ecology, and Walt Whitman’s Poetics of Trans-human Kinship
Walt Whitman’s poetry is famously full of ‘self’ and self-contradicting: ‘Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)’ The scholarly attention to paradox and contradiction often takes the form of an attention to various ‘binaries’ in Whitman’s...
| Published in: | Journal for the study of religion, nature and culture |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Equinox Publ.
2022
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| In: |
Journal for the study of religion, nature and culture
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| Further subjects: | B
Ethics
B Queer B Theory B Religion B Ecology B Gender B Trans |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Walt Whitman’s poetry is famously full of ‘self’ and self-contradicting: ‘Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)’ The scholarly attention to paradox and contradiction often takes the form of an attention to various ‘binaries’ in Whitman’s prose and poetry; well-trod binaries include body-soul, sacred-profane, nature-culture, and woman-man. However, a queer attention to the poetic construction of such binaries reveals them to be fluid and ultimately non-binary. Whitman and his speakers construct binaries that relate to religion, gender, and nature, but in poeticizing the construction of binary logic (e.g., man-woman), Whitman and his speakers reveal such purportedly self-contained and discrete domains to be open, fluid, and co-constituting. Recognizing the poetic performance of ‘binary’ logic will reshape reader’s understanding of ethical and political implications of Whitman’s queerly relational nature ethics. |
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| ISSN: | 1749-4915 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal for the study of religion, nature and culture
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1558/jsrnc.22963 |