ORCID
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1618-9077
Date of Award
Summer 8-15-2019
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
This dissertation argues that during the mid nineteenth century, American authors including Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Frederick Douglass saw the traditionally elite genre of portraiture as an auspicious site for experimenting with democratic art and politics. In frontispieces, photographs, novels, poems, and lectures, they tested the ways an image of one unique self might fit together more or less harmoniously with images of other “equal” selves, together building an image of an egalitarian social and political collectivity. The portrait was key because it spoke directly to the fundamental structural trouble looming over the proposition of democratic equality, namely the relation of part to whole—also known as the problem of the one and the many encoded in the national motto “E pluribus unum.” This problem was (and is) about the tension between core American values of equality and diversity. How could people be equal and different at the same time? That question seemed to pose the basic problem of irreconcilable values at the heart of American aesthetics and politics leading up to the Civil War. In light of it, Melville, Whitman, and Douglass strategized different responses, ranging from Melville’s qualified skepticism to Whitman’s visionary mysticism to Douglass’s pragmatic liberalism. To understand the why and how of these responses, this project draws on word and image theory to develop an expanded definition of portraiture that links it to narrative and introduces it in new ways to literary studies. Building on recent advances in formal analysis, I show democratic aesthetics and politics mutually constituted by imagination on the one hand and materiality on the other.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Abram Van Engen
Committee Members
Nathaniel Jones, Angela Miller, Vivian Pollak, Rafia Zafar,
Recommended Citation
Loonin, Paulo Miller, "Democratic Portraiture: Imagining Equal Selves in Melville, Whitman, and Douglass" (2019). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1923.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/1923
Included in
Aesthetics Commons, American Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons
Comments
Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.7936/8cp7-8q20