“I sing the body electric,” Walt Whitman proclaims in his 1855 poem, a song that celebrates the physicality of the human body. Tracing Whitman’s influence forward and backward, we will examine representations of the body in literature as it has been defined and reimagined across historical periods, national boundaries, and literary genres.

 

Probing the relationship between physical, imagined, and metaphorical bodies, we will approach questions of embodiment from a variety of interdisciplinary angles to ask: Who/what counts as a body, and how is it linked to power, citizenship, subjectivity, identity, and selfhood? What do bodies reveal about knowledge, desire, and memory? How do bodies transform across time, place, and space? How do bodily articulations reflect social and political attitudes about class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? What is the body’s role in the formation of and/or performance of identity? We will also consider the body as a poetic form, attending to the overlapping ways with which we read bodies as texts and texts as bodies.