Chapter 3 - The Politics of Paying Attention: The Romantic Desire for Immediacy

Summary

Commenting on the findings of the previous two chapters on Emerson’s and Whitman’s reflections on photographic immediacy, this chapter stresses the social, political, and media cultural context of their work. It argues that Emerson’s and Whitman’s romantic quest for immediacy was not an escapist endeavor that aimed to keep literature aloof from larger social and technological transformations. Instead, both writers creatively responded to the reshaping of American society under the pressures of budding industrialization and halting democratization processes by developing a poetics that sought to connect literary and social practices. Emerson’s and Whitman’s poetics of immediacy ground literary communication in the lived experience of writers and readers, make literature relevant to the concerns of everyday life (including social and sexual relations, spirituality, work, and politics), and seek to strengthen their readers’ active participation in the world.