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American Literature and the Public Sphere

Discussions of the public sphere in American literary scholarship commonly overemphasize the role that print plays in defining public discourse, neglecting the persistent importance of verbal arts such as oratory, and at the same time assuming a sharp divide between printed texts and oral performances. This opposition between printed works and oral forms has both practical and aesthetic consequences. Practically speaking, such approaches ignore the substantial overlap and integration of spoken and written or printed texts, while in aesthetic terms they ignore the considerable phonemic appeal that printed texts possess. The graphic element of print appeals to the visual and logical dimensions of language; printed works also frequently appeal to our pleasure in the aural qualities of language through incantation, rhyming, anti-logical rhythms, free verse, and rhetorical flights. The phenomenology attributed to print shapes accounts of the public sphere and literature’s role within it. In “Whitman Drunk,” the essay that concludes his 2002 collection Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner identifies print as the dominant material and symbolic form shaping Whitman’s poetics and the emergent queer counterpublic sphere that Whitman influenced. At the end of the essay, Warner quotes passages from two poems that foreground the themes of physical presence and mediation in relation to print. “To a Stranger” describes how “You,” presumably the reader, “give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return, / I am not to speak to