The Secret Lives of Poems: Digital Inhabitations of Nineteenth-Century American Literature Restricted; Files Only
Shipp, Kayla (Spring 2022)
Abstract
In nineteenth-century America, poems functioned as interactive physical pieces of cultural media, thanks to technological advancements that made paper materials and the texts they constituted cheaper to produce and disseminate. The poems were structurally unbound, experimental, and materially easy to exchange—products of increasingly fluid and responsive relationships between texts, authors, and audiences, and the absence of rigid expectations for literary form. Yet they are often deceptively flat when encountered in formal print materials. For example, Emily Dickinson’s 1,789 poems were written on scraps of paper (often mailed to friends); but readers now encounter the poems in poor transcriptions and chaotic print collections. Each of my dissertation’s four chapters centers on a nineteenth-century author’s writing that I argue is a poem historically failed by print; Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems, Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, Frances Watkins Harper’s newspaper poems, and Walt Whitman’s autobiography Specimen Days. I posit that a given poem’s struggle to communicate in print materials comes not from an internal problem with the poem, but from a tension within the surface where any reader past or present has encountered it. I argue that these internally and externally interactive poems prefer to live on digital surfaces where we can play with them instead, and that the poems are themselves intrinsically digital. I argue that the “secret lives” of these poems are their unseen existence and function as digital objects. I suggest that to read a poem is to inhabit it–to get inside of its pieces and contradictions—and I build accompanying digital publications that give readers locations to do so. I suggest that the bounded, interactive artifacts I have made ask for engagement just as any work of art does, as something that wants to be seen and encountered. I present “digital humanities” as a mode of thinking and creating, not a methodology. My work suggests that a digitally humanistic approach allows us to move through and past both literary critique and the mechanics of tool-building—to do creative scholarship. It gives scholarship the imperative not just to break things down, but to use its pieces to build something.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 1: “A FAIRER HOUSE THAN PROSE”: EMILY DICKINSON’S DIGITAL POEMS 12
INTRODUCTION 13
THEORY 20
APPLICATION 33
CONCLUSION 41
CHAPTER 2: OF WHALES IN CODE; OR, MOBY DICK AS HYPERTEXT 43
INTRODUCTION 46
THEORY 55
APPLICATION 65
CONCLUSION 73
CHAPTER 3: “THINGS FALL APART”: THE DIGITAL EPHEMERALITY OF FRANCES E.W. HARPER’S NEWSPAPER POEMS 74
INTRODUCTION 75
THEORY 83
APPLICATION 94
CONCLUSION 100
CHAPTER 4: COLLECTION (MY) SELF: THE POETICS OF VIRTUAL SPACE IN WALT WHITMAN’S SPECIMEN DAYS 101
INTRODUCTION 102
THEORY 117
APPLICATION 108
CONCLUSION 123
CODA 126
APPENDICES 129
WORKS CITED 157
About this Dissertation
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File download under embargo until 18 May 2026 | 2020-03-25 16:55:15 -0400 | File download under embargo until 18 May 2026 |
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