Ch. 5: "Afoot with my vision": Whitmania and Tourism in the Digital Age
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Description
This chapter appears in the book, From Page to Place: American Literary Tourism and the Afterlives of Authors. Edited by Jennifer Harris and Hilary Iris Lowe.
Chapter abstract: This essay draws upon my experience as a teacher of a digitally-inflected seminar on the American poet Walt Whitman in examining how our practices and experiences as literary tourists are affected by the promises of accessibility and immediacy on the internet. The essay raises questions about what “seeing things” really means, questions that are entwined for me with Whitman’s own exhortations: “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, [. . .] nor feed on the spectres of books,” he tells us, “You shall not look through my eyes either.” What is the difference between our eyes and the lens of the digitizing scanner or photographer? How do we “remember” something we see in person when the digital images of it that are available are all of higher quality but framed by someone else? When we tour online, are we taking things at second or third-hand? Or, instead, are we fooling ourselves that we are really, truly seeing through an author’s eyes and not just our own when we stand in the author’s prior physical spaces?
ISBN
9781625342331
Publication Date
2017
Publisher
University of Massachusetts Press
City
Amherst
Keywords
Literary tourism, Walt Whitman, Digital age, Perspectives
Disciplines
American Literature | Literature in English, North America
Recommended Citation
Scanlon, Mara, "Ch. 5: "Afoot with my vision": Whitmania and Tourism in the Digital Age" (2017). English & Linguistics Books. 8.
https://scholar.umw.edu/elc_books/8